I Love Lucid

Imagine waking up from a lucid dream and being able to paint from memory everything you saw and experienced in the dream. The paintings of Edward Hopper to me look like fragments of a dream where everything is real, and where nothing is real. Remote buildings; mostly empty. Individuals; generally portrayed as lonely and isolated in equally isolated urban cityscapes. They kind of look like regular places but are like no town or city you can remember having visited.

Here's a little exercise I did recently using a bit of human/machine collaboration (AI to you): I 'asked' it to interpret buildings and places I know (some still with us, some long since demolished) and generate images (without providing photographs) in the style of a Hopper painting. The final images conjure up a world where, just like a lucid dream where you know you're dreaming and not actually living in this place and, despite every effort you make to, for instance, read a line of text from a book or a sign on a building, the words don't really make sense. As you can see from a couple of the images below, it's a similar principle.

I often have breakfast at the Warsaw Diner on a Saturday morning. This version of my favourite diner takes it into a whole new dimension. Am I in this version of the eaterie with these lost souls (nighthawks)? I could be. But why is it dark? And where is the friendly Polish lady that always greets me from behind the counter like a member of her family? Wait a minute, where's the bloody counter? I guess what I'm saying is, where's the friendly daytime vibe gone?

The football ground is interesting. I know Meadow Lane, where Notts County have been plying their trade since 1862, but this is not it. The lettering on the main stand is nearly right, but not quite (on one of the images anyway), and the advertising hoardings make no sense whatsoever. Again, the positioning of individuals on the pitch are all wrong. What are they doing, and why are the floodlights are in the wrong place? (One of them is in the back garden of a house that doesn't even exist); that would really bug me. And yet it's a ground I now want to go to. I belong there. Drop me in this painting and I may never come back.

The ABC cinema on Long Row was an old haunt of mine before the wrecking ball paid it a visit in the 1990s. It was always a bit scuzzy, not a fleapit exactly, but it had seen better days. In this reimagined picture house, rebranded here as the ABOC(!), I immediately feel an affinity with both it and its surroundings. Again, beam me up here and, even though I can't for the life of me work out what they're showing (Siult Ack Tone?), I'd certainly sit in the doubles and give it a go.

And finally, Nottingham's iconic Council House. It's famous lions that sit either side (including our beloved Left Lion) have seemingly strolled off somewhere. Oh, and Market Square has been totally airbrushed out of this particular dream; leaving this most imposing of buildings almost totally in shadow (textbook Hopper). And the red brick building on the corner - as most red brick buildings in Hopper's work - is a bit of a tease; what secrets lie behind its walls and windows? Or in this case, what (or who) lurks around the corner? 

I need to visit this parallel version of the place I call home. A whole new world awaits.