reading response #3

I picked the essay Edward Hopper’s Office at Night: A Close Reading from the section Telling Stories because I really enjoy the artists idea of having the viewer decide the story and pick what they think is happening. He puts two a male and a female in a room together and lets you think about what is happening. When I first looked at this picture I got the idea that it was a man that is more than likely having an affair with his good looking secretary. I thought this way because of the way they have her standing and they way that she is dressed. I feel like in her mind she is trying to think of a way that she can provocatively pick up the piece of paper that has fallen on the ground to grab the man at the desk working attention. As I read the article I soon learned that this is how a lot of people viewed the picture, and for another reason other than the things that I just have noted, for example the wind blowing in through the window the artist, Edward Hopper, used that has a metaphor for touch. So that makes me think of in another scene of this story they would probably be touching. Something that I read that was interesting that someone else had interpreted the picture is that the woman is the big boss and the man behind the desk is he assistant, which very well might be true. Hopper did many different permutation, or sketches, of this picture where he had just a woman in the picture and then when he added the man he moved them around and had the two of them viewed from different viewpoints. He had one viewpoint being from a window so it would like the viewer was looking in at the two together through a window. I think that that would have made the picture more interesting because then the viewer could have became the husband or wife of the man and women in the office, which would have made it more so like it was an affair going on and the husband or wife was checking in on them. This of course would limit the possibilities of what the picture was about and I don’t think that’s what this author wanted to do. He said in the essay that “if you could say it, there’d be no reason to paint” and I think he liked to leave the story open for people to decide what’s going on.