Photo-realist artist pulls poetry out of downtown shopping areas

•  'Hey, Shell doesn't use Chevys!'

By Matthias Petry

It was just a visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, but it changed the life of then-12-year-old Robert Cottingham forever when he saw Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning for the first time.

"That painting had something that was so powerful. I literally discovered a new language, a visual language," Cottingham recalls now, 56 years later, of his first exposure to photo-realism.

He visited USU on Monday for a public lecture to talk about his influences, his most important works and the working process.

"Paintings are not just pictures of things, they are much more than that," he believes.

Robert Cottingham is one of America's most important first-generation
photo-realist painters. Although he has also used trains, old cameras and
typewriters as subjects, he is best known for his works on the landscape of
downtown America, portraying neon signs and street facades, or "pulling poetry out of downtown shopping areas," as he likes to call it. He usually works in series; among his best-known works are "Facades," "The American Alphabet," and the "Rolling Stock" series. His most recent work again focuses on old typewriters.

His early works had only few colors, sometimes even just one -- for example, his "Truck" series. He recalled one of the paintings, showing a yellow Chevy truck with a Shell logo, in particular because of the unique criticism he got from one of his friends:

"He came into my apartment, saw the picture and just said: 'Hey, Shell doesn't use Chevys!' Well, you never know where the criticism is going to come from," Cottingham remembered with a smile.

The big conceptual switch in his work came when a friend asked him to draw the famous 20th Century Fox-logo, which finally inspired him to do the unique photo-realist style he is known for. He liked the richness of the color, the sense of abstraction and the overall composition of the final picture:

"There's a lot in that picture that I thought I could take some lessons from."

As his main influences, he names painters such as Piet Mondrian, Charles Demuth, Geogre Toorer, Stuart Davis and above all, Edward Hooper.

However, he also admits that his work as an art director and graphic designer in advertising, before his career as a painter, had a strong influence on his work.

When talking about his working process, Cottingham explained that he uses photographs as basis for his paintings, sometimes even when drawing small objects such as cameras or typewriters. One picture usually takes about one month, sometimes two, depending on the size of the picture. Surprisingly, most satisfactory in the whole process to him is not the final picture.

"Of course, when it's finished it feels pretty good, but to overcome the little everyday problems is even more satisfying to me," Cottingham says.

About a bottom line to his pictures, particularly his works on the urban landscape, he says, "I guess I can say they are about who we were in the mid-20th century. There is something noble in them, something that has pride."

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