Contemporary Haibun Online

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March 2007, vol 3 no 1

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Bruce Ross

Edward Hopper

A modern American haiku master said anyone who likes haiku, likes Hopper. The paintings hang like muted stained glass windows in this retrospective. The familiar scenes of urban loneliness and rural emptiness pose a new thought. These somehow dramatic presentations of psychological alienation are actually images found in lucid dreaming. The documented studies drawn from “real” life are treated with the strange defamiliarization of dream states. I remember the spiraling into the chiaroscuro of dream in Strick’s “Freud” or Fellini’s  “8 1/2” or my own. I remember how emotion is suspended in a vacuum more real than real.

                                                  self-portraits
                                                  earliest and last ones
                                                  the same shadows