Dru Philippou
Under the Clamor
Edward Hopper’s painting Early Sunday Morning reveals a New York street lined by linked two-story buildings with shops below and apartments above. Horizontal and vertical lines create stability and rhythm. But the building’s diagonal shadows threaten this equilibrium as does the tilted barber pole on the sidewalk, with its slanting bands of red, white, and blue. The business names obscured by paint and the lack of people and street signs all contribute to the silence.
But all too soon, a shopkeeper’s doorbell rings. A woman raises one of the yellow blinds and a hand pulls aside a white curtain. Traffic starts to roar over loose manhole covers, creating a da-dunk refrain, muffled jackhammers, cracking concrete, still too loud, police rumbler sirens audible even through earbuds, helicopters whapping low near Sullivan’s building with its terracotta angels, then onward to Central Park, to Filipino nannies pushing buggies around the bronze statue of Alice in Wonderland, to joggers and buskers and honking geese and squirrels gnawing their teeth down on hazelnuts.
The canvas weave shows through the scumbled paint. I slip back into that other world where everything’s already offered.
a red-tailed hawk rises from an oak drifting on Hopper’s single note of blue
free at last to feel the grief pooling inside me all year I navigate its full range of colors
Note: Click here to see Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning.
About the Author
Dru Philippou was born on the island of Cyprus, raised in London, and currently lives in northern New Mexico, where hiking in the high desert wilderness around her home nourishes both her spirit and her writing.