PRESTON DICKINSON

 

PRESTON DICKINSON

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah 

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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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COLIN CAMPBELL COOPER

 SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Colin Campbell Cooper Jr. (1856-1937) was an American Impressionist architectural landscape painter. He was an ardent traveller, and has drawn numerous skyscrapers and urban architecture scenes of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. He was as proficient in watercolours as he was in oils. He often created small well-detailed study in watercolour, before the full size oil painting. Cooper used both, the colour and texture with seamless transition. Cooper’s wife Emma Lampert, was herself a noted artist.

Cooper said that he was "greatly interested in the skyscraper buildings in Broad Street. It was intensely interesting to watch the freakishness disappear from those queer towering structures in the glory of the right kind of light" –  

"one of the points that most strikes me about this view up Broad Street is the dramatic contrast between the old, low type of buildings ... and the great skyscrapers. My pictures are built on these contrasts."

 

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