I’m not sure what spurred the effort to paint in my office while I work, but effects of coronavirus disruptions in the last several weeks seemed to have made the effort a restorative distraction. Hopper’s Chop Suey is one of my favorite paintings of all time—for its foregrounding of visual rhythms, for its muscular color and drawing, for its historical, American theme, and for its novel image quality. By performing an interpretive copy of Hopper’s painting, I also discovered its solid structure, its lack of precision with perspective, and its wonderful representation of lighted space.
Technically speaking, I stretched a scrap of linen on stretcher bars that are proportionally true to the original, I worked much more quickly with handlings than is my habit, and my palette was limited to six or seven tubes. My goal was not simulation or replication, but interpretation.