My Feet in front of Nighthawks

This picture was taken at the Art Institute of Chicago, in front of Nighthawks, Edward Hopper's iconic painting. You can see in the clinical composition of Nighthawks that Hopper is fascinated by light and architecture as much if not more than by people; it's partly the love he shows for the empty streets and complex shapes of objects in light and shadow that makes the people in the painting seem so lonely and displaced. It's not hard to imagine that he ended up painting sunlight in empty rooms.

Hopper painted Nighthawks in 1942, as American involvement in World War II was ramping up for three more years of terror and death. Yet Nighthawks is a meditative, calm painting, untouched by war; unless it is the absence of people, especially young men, which haunts the darkness behind the four people in the scene.