The World of Myth Magazine

Sometimes art only exists to capture a mood. While art can be beautiful, ugly, terrifying, or glorious, sometimes it can simply be peaceful. It can be easy to assume that because one piece of art, like by Picasso or Botticelli, can be interpreted in several different ways, then all good art must be interpretable. That is not true. It might be missing the point to look hard at novels by Stephen King or P. G. Wodehouse the way we need to with James Joyce or someone like that. Stephen King wants to tell a story before anything else. Wodehouse—he just wants to make us laugh. Edward Hooper, here in his 1942 painting Nighthawks, may only have been trying to depict a mood, and to leave an impression of that mood on the viewer.

The scene depicted is that of a quiet city street at night, and a handful of people are enjoying a cup of coffee and a chat in a diner. It is a beautiful image, but at first glance, it is not easy to say exactly why it is beautiful. This is not meant critically, but aside from the way the characters are drawn, this image is not very flashy or sophisticated in composition. The details are not very complicated—the bright brown door in the far-right background seems to be at an odd angle, suggesting the diner we are looking at has a weird triangular shape. The darkened street outside the diner, the rest of the scene, feels very blocky, still, lifeless. The rendering of these peoples' faces is amazingly detailed, but the world around them is almost cartoonish with how flat and 'painted' it feels. This is not like a painting by Georgia O'Keefe or Camille Pissarro's Boulevard Montmartre which are so full of life and vitality, for an example look at this work by Pissarro:

But even if some of the finer details seem weird when you look hard enough, and the shadows that fall onto the street outside do not quite match with what is going on inside, the effect of the contrasting light and dark areas of this painting are creating a sort of life vs darkness, and because the darkness of the night uses a lot of blue color, the painting feels very welcoming and homely. The world outside the café feels dead, but is this not what cities really feel like at night? Especially when quiet?

I have lived in cities myself, and remember coming home from the bars and pubs, walking through empty and peaceful streets—and feeling that slightly chill but not cold wind that flows through the emptiness. When the stillness and silence is broken only by the occasional sound of a bus or the calls of cats or dogs, and the only light around is the somehow dead light of streetlights. That mood and tone is perfectly captured in this painting. Drinking coffee in a warm place, away from the cool night outside: this is a time for reflection and calm conversation. The viewer really feels this, and what it is like for the people in that café—happy to be somewhere for a moment and simply exist.

But there is a sense of isolation here too. None of the customers in this café are talking to each other, they barely seem to even notice each other. Except for the couple, everyone in the café is distanced from everyone else in some way—and the couple are not looking at each other, although they are looking at the same person. There is a space between them and the man sitting on a stool to the left of them, and both they and that patron are physically separated from the diner's barman by the bar itself as he kneels working on something unseen.

It seems, going by the small expressions on their faces, like everyone in this painting, lonely in some way. It is as if they are all lost in their own heads, not saying much of a consequence, and they are alone together in this place where they can relax and be at peace. There is a stillness in this painting, but it is not sadness. This is just what it feels like to be alone with other human beings in a time and a place like the one depicted here: a calm moment in a city that would day be alive with people and business during the day. Life will go on tomorrow when the sun comes up again, and all the energy and stress of our lives will continue. But for now, in this painting, there is only the tranquility of night—and that can be exactly what you want to feel sometimes.