How a Painting helped Me Find Solace in Solitude
Art serves not only to forge an imaginative universe and merely offer transient escapism from crises, but also enables the beholder to comprehend, reconcile and come to terms with their own reality, and the vagaries and non-idealities of life. If a crisis is an ailment, art is both the analgesic as well as the long-term cure. It is why we turn to art, for both its acute and lasting therapeutic effects. The artwork that I turn to, in order to cope, persevere, and recuperate is Edward Hopper’s 1942 oil-on-canvas painting ‘Nighthawks’.
I was profoundly influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. It offered me solace in the trying times that my high-school days were, having to cope with the financial hardships of my family, existential questions, peer-pressure, and entrance-exam performance anxiety. After watching the movie, I had a lot of realizations but ended up with many more questions than answers. Art doesn’t spoonfeed, it provokes you to seek food, at least pick to pick up the cutlery. In order to quench my curiosity and being fascinated by the pioneering tone, feel, and semblance of the movie, I researched into its background. It was then that I first came across Nighthawks, an inspiration behind the movie’s pioneering tone and feel. I would brood on the painting often, but I would rather term it contemplation, nay meditation. It helped me conciliate myself and come to terms with the struggle between childhood imagination and the skepticism that marks young-adulthood. It enabled me to cope with the delayed onset of my adolescence and maturation, growing up in an ultraconservative family, and reconcile the tug of war between the cold, scientific principles I was learning at the academy, and the spiritual, meditative closure I sought. Nighthawks showed me that philosophy and original thought can spring from the ordinary. They can be encountered in everyday settings and needn’t arise from textbooks and dated treatises. It expanded my perception of art, which was thereto limited to a very pure, ideal, classical, and armchair narrative.
Today, confined in my humble home, the painting which serves as the wallpaper of my workstation, is a source of universal solace. The loneliness in it resonates with one and all — an oxymoronic solidarity of being solitary, a sense of separation tantalizingly coexisting with a pan-civilization resonance. It injects us with an iota of the same, immunizing us against loneliness itself. The more that I look at the piece, the more do I realize how astoundingly timeless it is for something with such a meticulous construction and set in such a specific locale. The longer that I linger with the Painting, the more at home do I feel with my woes, regrets, and dissatisfactions. When one looks at the night owls in it, they seem as detached from the viewer as they are from each other. Alone at my home, I make it a point to dine in their company.
