Dilara Dolu Köksal

It was 1991.
One of the books I read at school was The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
If you ask me what I remember most about that book, I’d answer with a single word: the cover. They had used Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942, oil on canvas) as the cover image. I was instantly struck by it—the kind of image you can’t stop looking at. Nighthawks…
Why would a child be so deeply affected by the quietest painting of Edward Hopper? Whatever I felt when I first saw it on that book cover—I can say, even after all these years—I still feel exactly the same.
Nighthawks speaks of loneliness at its core… but not in a dramatic way. It’s quiet, distant, and uncannily familiar. Hopper’s solitude has a strange kind of calm to it—one that brings peace rather than sorrow.
Edward Hopper
Hopper was an American painter, born in New York in 1882. He’s often said to depict “ordinary” moments, but I find that word inadequate. Because Hopper’s paintings, while still and silent on the surface, carry a deep psychological tension within. There’s a cinematic stillness to them… an unresolved feeling that lingers, prompting the viewer to search for meaning. His works offer a kind of emptiness—not a void, but a space where the viewer can project themselves. Perhaps that’s why, even as a child, I felt like the moment depicted in Nighthawks somehow belonged to me. As if it was a memory—not just a painting I was looking at, but a moment I had already lived.
In Nighthawks, we see four people in a dimly lit American diner, late at night. There’s warmth inside, but it doesn’t feel real.
The people are close, yet distant. Together, yet alone.
We witness disconnection, emotional isolation, and the quiet fragmentation of urban life. And Hopper doesn’t need dramatic poses or exaggerated compositions to express this. The balance he strikes between light and shadow, the restrained coldness in his palette, is more than enough. There’s an almost mathematical order between architecture and figures—one that, I believe, gives the viewer a strange sense of comfort.
And perhaps for this very reason, Hopper’s paintings aren’t understood through knowledge, age, or intellectual background—but through intuition and inner emptiness. Which is why a child can stand before one of his paintings and be completely still.
Or maybe, children experience true loneliness more clearly than adults do.
Hopper’s Nighthawks makes the viewer feel like an outsider looking in, but at the same time, the people inside the painting feel somehow outside too. It’s one of those moments where time seems to stand still.
I encountered it through the cover of a novel. And perhaps that moment was the very beginning—the moment I should’ve asked myself: how much of myself would belong in that painting.
Some moments in life are like Hopper’s paintings.
They don’t show you something new. They awaken something already inside you. And that’s why you never forget them—not for what they reveal, but for what they stir within.
Sometimes, everything begins with a night hidden on the cover of a novel.
20. 05. 2025