THE VISUAL TOOLKIT FOR CONSTRUCTING LIMINAL SPACE IN EDWARD HOPPER’S URBAN LANDSCAPES

Abstract

The article explores the visual mechanisms through which Edward Hopper constructs liminal space within his urban landscapes. The purpose of the research is to reveal how compositional geometry, light treatment, chromatic contrasts, and architectural symbolism generate the sense of transition, ambiguity, and existential suspension characteristic of Hopper’s art. The study applies a combined formal-stylistic and semantic-symbolic method. The results show that Hopper’s visual language systematically produces a model of liminality grounded in the tension between presence and absence, stillness and movement, light and shadow. Hopper’s imagery – empty streets, desolate and alienating depictions of industrial buildings with “blind” windows, interiors deprived of both light and life, deserted railway stations with tracks leading “nowhere” – emerges as a symbolic boundary between the inner and the outer, the visible and the hidden, the real and the unreal. The palette and lighting blur the temporal threshold between dawn and dusk, creating an impression of an existential pause – a moment outside of time. Uncanniness is connoted through cool, desaturated colors; light that illuminates the buildings yet fails to penetrate inside; and the ambivalence of warm and cool tones. In the paintings where a warm palette domi- nates, the effect of warmth is “subdued” by deep shadows, the dramatic contrast of light and darkness, enclosed spaces, and the ambivalence of light sources, all of which generate a sense of temporal uncertainty and inner tension rather than warmth. The composition of these works simultaneously stabilizes and destabilizes perception, creating tension between the whole and its fragments, between compositional unity and Hopper’s characteristic multiplication of frames, between the dynamism implied by the imagery and angles of the train, railway, etc. and the stasis created by the perfectly symmetrical positioning of objects that perceptually “fixes” them in place. Through numerous framing devices, intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, and perspectival ambiguity, the artist constructs spaces that oscillate between completion and indeterminacy. The study concludes that Hopper’s visual toolkit – compositional geometry, tonal contrast, spatial layering, and symbolic illumination – constructs an experience of being “in between.” His urban scenes function as metaphors for psychological and ontological thresholds, transforming the city into a frontier where opposites coexist and meaning emerges through ambiguity. These findings demonstrate how visual form embodies the concept of liminality and offer methodological insights into the relationship between space, symbolism, and existential experience in modern visual culture.