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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GEORGE COPELAND AULT

GEORGE COPELAND AULT

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Sunday Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

GEORGE COPELAND AULT (1891-1948) was an American painter of non-frivolous architectural and urban scapes. He painted whatever he saw around him meticulously, but with abstract realism. Ault painted with oil, watercolour and pencil, but simplifying into geometrically structured shapes and planes. In his wife's words, painting for him was a means of ‘creating order out of chaos’.

Ault has treated the darkness, not as absence of light, but for giving a new measure to already familiar forms. He used street or moon light to play up the darkness. He minimises the illusion of space, and the ‘forms of the buildings seem to hug the surface of the picture plane’.

He, with his contemporaries, like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, have developed a style of eerie quietude that reflects the uncertainties, despair, loneliness of periods of 1930's recession and WW-II.

Ault was extremely perfectionist. He desired studio and house to be perfectly clean, shining and arranged before he could sit down at his easel. In the last decade or two, he became alcoholic, due to several incidences of personal-family misfortunes. He lived in a small rented cottage at Woodstock that had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Ault created some of his finest paintings during this time, but had difficulty selling them due to bad economic conditions. 

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