Three Things: The Waiting Edition
We spend a large portion of our lifetime waiting for things. Waiting for the bus to come, for the bathroom to be free, for the movie to start. Waiting at the doctor’s office, at the airport, at the DMV. Waiting for the barista to make your coffee, for the traffic light to change… OK, I think you get the idea. This week, let’s write about waiting. Below, I’ve chosen three mid-century painters to help remind you what it feels like.
George Tooker, The Waiting Room, 1959. Egg tempera on wood. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Norman Rockwell, Waiting for the Art Editor, circa 1970. Oil on canvas.
Edward Hopper, Hotel Window, 1955. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
PSST, WRITERS: It’s online Open Mic this week! Submit your work-in-progress prose or poetry piece today and tomorrow, and get feedback from your fellow writers on Wednesday!
Summer is the time for road trips and getaways — and with it, sleeping in hotels and motels. Let’s pack a bag, jump in the car, train, boat, or jet, and spend a few days in another place, enjoying the new view from our foreign beds. Here are three such views to prompt some plots.
Edward Hopper, Western Motel, 1957. Oil on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut.
Pablo Picasso, Postcard to Jean Cocteau, St.-Raphaël, 1919. Ink and watercolor on card.
Walker Pickering, Motel Bien Venido, 2010. Photograph. www.walkerpickering.com
On sunny but chilly winter days, sometimes there’s nothing better than curling up in a south-facing room and tracking the sunbeams as they move across the walls and floor. The slow, deliberate movement from one end to the other at times takes on a meditative quality, a reminder of the passage of time; and at other times it seems as if the sun is performing a sweeping, slow-motion scan, taking a daily inventory of each room’s contents. Or perhaps these phantom windows of light that are projected onto our walls are portals to some other place, the key to which we have yet to discover?
This week I have three such rooms, three such sunlit walls. How will they serve in your piece?
Uta Barth, Untitled (aot 4) from …and of time, 2000. Diptych color photographs.
Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room, 1963. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Vilhelm Hammershoi, Interior Strandgade, circa 1900. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Three Things: Train Whistle Edition
I lived, for a time, in a small Midwestern town with a railroad running through it. The train whistles on quiet nights were one of my favorite things about living there, at once melancholy and comforting. Like a late-night bell toll, those far-off whistles break into a gentle reverie as if to say, “I am here, too! You are not alone, awake in the dark.”
It is perhaps, then, no wonder that when I discovered The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows a while ago in the strange depths that is Tumblr, the very first (and possibly the shortest) entry caught my attention:
ameneurosis
n. the half-forlorn, half-escapist ache of a train whistle calling in the distance at night.
There are many other lovely imaginary words and definitions to be found in the (local!) blog—indeed, it was very hard to choose between them—but for this week’s Three Things, it is that train, off in the distance. I have for you this week not three images of trains (that felt too easy), but three pieces in which I can imagine the distant hail of a locomotive.
Don’t forget to listen for that whistle.
Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea, 1948. Tempera. Private collection.
Alfred Stieglitz, A Snapshot: Paris, 1911. Photograph.
