GAS
EDWARD HOPPER, 1940
Okay, this one starts with a car. 1927. Hopper's paintings have finally started to sell, he's forty-four, and the first big thing he does with the money is buy a used Dodge. And the Dodge kind of changes American art. He packs the trunk with paints and easels, Jo rides along, and they turn into road people. Gone for weeks. Cape Cod, Vermont, eventually California, all the way down into Mexico. Half the time he paints right in the car. And somewhere out that windshield he finds his real subject: the in-between stuff. Diners. Motels. The places you pass at sixty miles an hour without a thought. Like a gas station at dusk. He wanted to paint one, drove all over Cape Cod looking, and no real station was right. So he glued this one together out of bits of stations near his house in Truro. The gas station in his head. Which is why it feels like every gas station at dusk you've ever passed. And give it one look on its own terms. The sky's still blue, but the woods have gone black. Night out here doesn't fall, it comes out of the trees. One man in a tie, closing up for nobody. And holding all that dark off, a flying red horse. Greek myth, hired to sell gasoline. So if this feels like a shot from some movie you can't quite place, you've got it backwards. Wim Wenders, the road-movie guy, said Hopper's paintings are like one long movie about America, every canvas the start of a scene. The movies didn't teach Hopper what a lonely gas station looks like. A quiet guy in a used Dodge taught the movies.