While doing Art A-Level my teacher came up to me and said, 'You should look at Hopper'... I went to the library looked at Hopper - then felt embarrassed - why did he ask me to look at Hopper - I remember just remembering all the pictures of nude women looking out of hotel windows streaming with bright sunlight - lighting up their torsos... I couldn't find the resemblance to my pictures at all...

Only now after reading about him in a Taschen book bought about a year ago, & this exhibition at the Tate Modern confirms it - I realise perhaps how much I might have had in common with Hopper...

It's true he wasn't an excellent painter - his figures are gawky, awkward looking - like mine? :(

I tried to create a 'happy scene' - it wasn't my intention to design a picture that was full of melancholy - Maybe it wasn't Hopper's either, but that he just produced sadness/ isolation/ emptiness' without going out to attempt to capture it...

Maybe it was just that he really was trying to paint everyday american life... Whatever he tried to paint - he would settle on painting a composition that contained himself - without being fully conscious of it...? A kind of emptiness... - His wife made sure all the female figures in his paintings were modelled on her - was she a domineering woman - was he really a 'lonely artist' stifled a bit by her?

He did try to compose pictures but again composition was not a strong point - critics have criticised - my art teacher told me that of my work too. I think Hopper did not have to try too hard to 'compose' his pictures, it is how he would naturally want them to be - how he would always settle on producing them...

'None is intended...' - no sophisticated meaning is meant to be in his paintings... he arrives at them in a simple straight forward way... There are no secrets to unravel... I don't think he is intending his paintings to be erotic - it's not consciously decided...

It's not just in the lonely person looking away, he gives us the same feeling from a figureless composition see: 'Stairway 1949' or: 'Sun in an Empty Room'...

I think light is a secondary element; primarily, foremost is something within in that is shown - light, loneliness, sadness - these are all the symptoms - the traits stemming from within him... that come through in his artwork...