Kelso Meets Hopper
A brief detour this time about other artists: Kelso and Hopper - delightful together, I think. On a recent gallery-visit outing with artist buddies Jim Kelly and Mike Blake to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover Massachusetts, I took a long look with the early 20th century oil painting “Freight Cars, Gloucester” by Edward Hopper. Those freight cars, odd at first glance, barge into the scene, upstaging a neat collection of buildings, rival rectilinear shapes, now hidden, and instead make the scene as much about the A-frame rooftops. The triangular shape of foreground telephone pole and its support, with the church steeple at its left overseeing it all, seems to visually stop the mystery box cars from going any further. The late after noon sun adds to the drama and fires up the foreground grasses as if they’re wildly applauding the action on the stage.
An Instagram post I had seen early that week by Jim Kelly (aka “Kelso”) came to mind. I pulled up his piece “Leftover Dreams” on my phone and made a screen grab. I couldn’t help but see some similarities in the composition; the diagonals, horizontal and vertical rectilinear shapes, and wondered what the two would look like if combined; can’t help it. After the screen grab, I pulled up an app with a simple tool for double exposures. 1928 meets 2021, with variations. First, the originals, then a few straight combos, and after that, with apologies to Hopper, I needed to also see how it would work if Hopper’s painting were flopped horizontally. Kelly is an old friend very much alive, Hopper’s long dead, the decision about whose gets flopped was easy.
Full disclosure, the above combinations were created in Photoshop. Here’s the original inspiration that was made on my phone with the Snapseed app. Hard to decide which I like best.
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