EDWARD HOPPER

In city and in countryside, you can find solitude. Loneliness is the pervading emotion of Hopper’s career, whether in the small of the evenings at a counter bar or battling waves against soaring blue skies, his paintings are imbued with a sense of tension between the individual and their environment, and a conflict between tradition and progress. Even in this work, perhaps no more than a simple doodle from a restless mind who expressed himself through gestural strokes, we can find the same ideas at play. Composed of few and determined lines, it’s subject matter is at charming odds with the insurance company letterhead it is drawn on. Hopper could have just have easily done an urban scene, a depiction of solitary business and quiet work that may have made more sense with the corporate medium he chose. Instead, traditional bursts forth - a small sloop sails with gusto, battling against the wind and the dark seas and the bare perceivable outline of three men look towards the horizon, searching for a different world.

JAMES CASTLE

In rural Idaho, in the final year of the 19th Century, James Castle was born. Profoundly deaf, he attended school only briefly and never learnt to read, write, or sign properly, he lived a largely uncommunicative life and was only understood by his loving family. Yet, despite his inability to speak or engage with words, Castle had something to say. Developing a sort of charcoal from a mix of soot collected from the fireplace and his own spit, he created hundreds of thousands of artworks using his fingers, sharpened sticks, or peach pits as tools, drawing on found paper and creating books from discarded objects such as this cigarette packet. Unaware of the art world developing around him, his work runs concurrently with the modes and movements across the western world - his own creations often predating mainstream ideas by years. He drew scenes of his domestic existence, of the rural characters he encountered, and the landscape and architecture he loved with an almost photographic memory. He drew across styles, creating works at times naive and abstract and others figurative and exacting - unbeknownst to him, Castle’s mind contained within it an understanding of almost every significant art movement of the 20th century.

MAN RAY

Like the stages of grief, a readymade object moved through ideas of destruction over forty years. When Man Ray first affixed the photograph of a women’s eye to a wooden metronome, it was merely to keep him company as he painted. The monotony of the metronome helped him regulate his brushstrokes, and he found he enjoyed the sensation of being watched by this detached voyeur until, in a moment of fury, he destroyed the metronome, birthing the artworks as ‘Object to Be Destroyed’. In the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the work caused a stir on debut and was regarded as a significant work of modern art almost immediately. Some 10 years later, Ray was left by his partner, the photographer Lee Miller, and replaced the anonymous eye on the metronome with a photograph of hers, renaming the work ‘Object of Destruction’ - its context changing from companion to judge, watching over him as a reminder of what he lost. In the 1950s, a group of Parisian student protesters broke into a museum showing the work and took Ray’s title seriously, destroying the original piece. Ray responded by creating 100 new editions, and titling it ‘Indestructible Object’, it’s context moving beyond the physical metronome and photograph and being an idea that can will live forever in the mind.