Faces of Loneliness

Perhaps, painting the concept of pain is easier than projecting its other possible derivatives, such as loneliness and longing.  More often than not, pain connotes to sadness and sorrow.  In essence, both loneliness and longing carry forms of pain, each with a possible strong connection to the other. Portraits of a  teary-eyed person with a slight slant on his lips, a person walking slowly with a hunched back, someone trying to hold on desperately to another in separation,  or someone looking into a cracked mirror cringing, all certainly depict some kind of pain.   

However, exhibiting loneliness in a work of art is something more grandeur, in my view. Loneliness carries more than just agony and dicomfort. It sustains deeper unfulflled desires. It drains the person bearing it as the soul tries to attain that which needs to be satisfied.  

Is it enough to draw a crying girl to represent the fact that she is lonely?  Or a person standing on a cliff looking down wanting to jump, or a sad face underneath a blanket during a rainy day?  Does being alone necessarily connotes isolation and despondency?  How does one paint  signs of these feelings which constitute the essence of lonesomeness? 

Edward Hopper, a realism artist who lived until the early 60s portrays in his works emptiness by depicting isolated individuals, a prevalent atmosphere which covered the US after the second world war.  Many of his works show a single person in a room almost barren, looking outside through a large window with an almost empty expression.  Almost all appraisals claim that his pictures always reveal loneliness because of this common theme of solitariness.  Yet I feel that there is more to it than meets the eye.

This very same feeling hence is further elaborated in his famous works, "Room in New York", where it shows, instead of a solitary individual, a man and a woman sitting in a room. Together, but disunited.  Each of them seems to be engrossed in their own activities.  There is disinterest in the way the woman lazily touches the keyboard of the piano where she partly faced, the other part of her body still lingers across the table from the gentleman. A few feet across the table, he keenly focuses on reading his newspaper.   There is disconnections, alienations, an eerie sadness and emptiness which cannot help but bursts out of the painting.  A familiar void which translates into a painful forsakenness.  It's a stark truth; one does not need to be alone to be completely lonely.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_in_New_York#/media/File:Room-in-new-york-edward-hopper-1932.jpg)

Often paintings such as this represents real life situation.  And as Edward Hopper softly pointed out how these scenes were made into beings as " ... a very complicated mental process that would not interest people,"(1) so can the manifestations of loneliness be around us.  At times, we must read between the lines,  between expressions and emotions,  as it sometimes hides underneath a smile, embedded within a busy crowd. 

(1) https://www.edwardhopper.net/room-in-new-york.jsp