Audience for an Audience for the Sun

A fun thing to do in downtown Washington, D.C., on your lunch break is go visit a museum. The Smithsonian, National Gallery of Art, and a lot of others are available, mostly free, and if you're in the neighborhood, even a quick visit is rewarding.

By quick, I mean, spend at least a few minutes really looking at something and thinking about it. This week I chose the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or SAAM, randomly got on the elevator around from the G St. entrance, went to the second floor, and was immediately floored by this:

People in the Sun (1960), Edward Hopper. SAAM. Photo: C.G. Wagner

The "really looking" prompt comes from the inspirational and insightful Amy Herman, author of The Art of Perception and Visual Intelligence. She spoke at a convention I worked at last year, and the latter book was one of my Metro Book Club selections.

Amy Herman book signing, ISRI2017. Photo: C.G. Wagner

So what did I see when looking at people looking at the Sun? Amy suggests starting with the basics: how many people, how many men, how many women, children? What are they wearing? What are they doing? She would advise not ascribing emotional undercurrents to the subjects but describe behaviors and any visual cues. What looks out of place? What is missing?

With this in mind, I see five people: two men and two women in front, and another man by himself in back. The people in the front row are looking ahead, and they're more formally dressed than the man in back, who is reading something. (Note to reader: I just edited "looking" in the previous sentence; I originally used "staring," which has emotional or non-emotional undertones.)

Beside the man alone in back, there is a chair that has a green blanket or other object in it. The people are together in the left side of the composition while the right side shows the environment they're looking at. It is a landscape with a low row of evenly sized hills or mountains, with a field of golden brown grass in front. The people are seated in rows, as in an outdoor auditorium or waiting room.

The portion of the composition with the most "activity" (human beings being alive on the Earth) is crowded and visually alive, and yet the actual subjects are not engaged either with each other or with their environment. One man has a pillow behind his head and is slumped more than the others. The blonde whose face cannot be seen appears to be turning slightly toward the man next to her, and her arm poised on the armrest, perhaps to move forward in the next moment.

Amy wants us to ask questions. What don't we know?

1. Are the people waiting for something, or are they already there, watching?
2. What are they waiting for, or watching?
3. What is the younger (I think) man in back reading?
4. Is what he's reading connected to what the others are watching/waiting for?
5. Is he related to any of the others?

The storyteller in me wants to say that young man a rogue nephew along for a free trip but unwilling to enjoy himself. Either that or he is the only one truly engaged in the moment, reading the brochure as I read the captions beside the paintings in the museum.

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Since everything is related to everything, I'll mention that I just finished my latest Metro Book Club selection, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. (It's actually his novelization of the screenplay for the film, which I've never been able to sit through in its entirety.) In it, Clarke's description of the sunset as seen from within the rings of Saturn is breathtaking (surely it would get a rise out of Hopper's passive audience):

As Discovery curved still closer to Saturn, the Sun slowly descended toward the multiple arches of the rings. Now they had become a slim, silver bridge spanning the entire sky; though they were too tenuous to do more than dim the sunlight, their myriad of crystals refracted and scattered it in dazzling pyrotechnics. And as the Sun moved behind the thousand-mile-wide drifts of orbiting ice, pale ghosts of itself marched and merged across the sky, and the heavens were filled with shifting flares and flashes. Then the Sun sank below the rings, so that they framed it with their arches, and the celestial fireworks ceased.

While I applaud from the audience gallery, gazing into the yellowing pages of a 95-cent paperback (printed about 8 years after Hopper painted his Sun-gazers), I can only wish Sir Arthur had been alive to inspire the voyager NASA is sending to the Sun tomorrow. Godspeed, Parker Solar Probe.

Love, hosaa
inspired by the Sun-inspired