PRESTON DICKINSON

 

PRESTON DICKINSON

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah 

Post -373 

William Preston Dickinson (1889-1930) was one of the first American artists of industrial-scapes in Precisionist # style.

Dickinson’s earliest Precisionist works used basic geometric shapes with abstraction as well as realism. He works, uses many styles and effects of contemporary art, but never consistently or in any definable in a chronological order. Many of his industrial scenes were imaginary.

Dickinson loved fluid effect of water colour and sharp strokes of crayons, and took both to the oil painting. He emphasized the vertical and upward perspective through, towers, chimneys, pipes, columns, grains elevators, water tanks. Very little representation of the nature is seen, be it trees, skies, or water bodies.

The urban structures were depicted in precise, sharply defined geometrical forms. The angular geometry was also part of cubist practice, but here in Dickinson’s works, the abstraction was not as obvious.

# Precisionism was the first exclusively US art movement relating to indigenous style of Modernism, emerging in post WW-1 period, around 1915. It became popular during 1920-30s for dealing with new lifestyles of skyscrapers, bridges, railway stations, automobiles and factories. It has also been called ‘Cubist-Realism. Contemporary critics had tough time to define the emergent trend in art. Another Precisionist artist Charles Chillers work was called the ‘Immaculates’. 

 

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