paintingsframe

Hopper's painting represents a borderline situation. It is set at the frontier between day and night, between civilization and nature. The gas station has the appearance of a last outpost, where the human realm gives way, across the road, to the anonymous realm of nature. the edge of the woods rises like a dark wall in which no individual tree can be discerned. But our eye returns again and again to its warm hue. The bright, almost pure white fluorescent light in the gas station, in contrast, is almost painful to look at, and the eye shifts to the ribbon of road leading out of the picture to the right.

 Hopper used the petrol pump motif seen in “Gas” again in Four Lane Road, 1956, and a gas station was again used as a symbol of commercial development and the religious belief in the blessings of technology in Portrait of New Orleans, 1950. In all three paintings we are presented with the merciless encroachment of the industrialized state on a constantly retreating natural environment.