Another way to look at Melancholy is through Edward Hopper paintings. Here what comes first to me is the different ways in which he portraits the modern human condition of solitude, where melancholy is usually associated with the condensation of double feelings such as hope, at one side, and despair, at the other, into a single sensation.
His paintings always show that aspect of life, almost at a point of an obsession, but sometimes looking at some of his paintings I don't feel that he portraits solitude in a desperate or negative way. I understand that solitude in Hopper's works is related to the advent of the modern, urban, world, but he seems to show some kind of redemptive possibility through his paintings, as if even if we are inexorably faced with solitude in modern times, there could be good things we could discover from that. Solitude in Hopper's works isn't related for me to emptiness....on the contrary, it is related to a certain kind of divine presence, some kind of aura of the moments when we might be able to experience life in a genuine, i.e. non erratic way, in comparison with modern life where everything runs so fast that we start to be unable to pause a while and enjoy ourselves with contemplative moods.
Looking again to Hopper's works, I would say that his main objective is to paint our modern human condition, where, as I have said previously, life is emptied from it's inner grace and happiness, but, notwithstanding, man still can rebuild this missing link, broken by history and modernity, by the pure contemplation of nature's redemptive powers, almost as if reality for him could be understood as nature basic elements as the sun light (especially), the fields, and landscape in general. Here, we could think of a relationship with impressionism, but there's something that is in fact different from it. As someone said, his sun light isn't totally happy as sometimes happen to be in impressionistic painters such as Renoir (but not all of them!). But for me there's always a feeling that he's trying to say that the consequences of modernity is a kind of real illusion compared to the true virtues of nature. For that reason there's always a place for the individual to rebuild the missing link between him and the other human beings, and this is done by the pure contemplation of nature's elements. So we cannot undue modernity, but we do have a way to escape from it's evil effects. We are locked in a solitary place, but nature's powers can always rebuild our bonds with the true condition of plenitude.
His paintings are, in some sense, a kind of natural religion, a contemplative prayer (religion: from the latin "religare" = to rebuild the broken bond) done to redeem ourselves from the evils of civilization. So there's an opposition between Nature and Culture, whereas he inverts the common valuation of them as in J.J.Rousseau for instance. It's always too good to feel that, despite the suffocating and darkening sensation brought by the buildings (the urban scenario), a simple bath of light can be as a pure breath of fresh air.
