Date: Fri 21-Mar-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Illustration: C

Location: A11

Quick Words:

Cottingham-alphabet-Aldrich

Full Text:

(feature on artist Robert Cottingham & his "American Alphabet" series)

Robert Cottingham: From A to Z

(with photo, artworks)

BY SHANNON HICKS

RIDGEFIELD - Signs are part of everyday life. We are surrounded by them: road

and highway signs, restaurant and theatre signs, signs advertising programs,

signs that announce the name of a firm, signs familiar and unfamiliar. Some

are repeated across the country and become ingrained into our subconscious,

others are unique to a particular business and are therefore familiar only to

those living within a certain geographic area.

Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York... the aesthetic of these cities is defined

as much by their glaring, downright gaudy displays of neon signs as by

anything that can be found in their museums.

Smaller cities across the country also boast such displays, on a much smaller

scale - commercial signs that use colored, gas-infused tubes, internally lit,

that can be seen blocks away. While neon is certainly used in other nations of

the world, its heyday has come and gone in the United States.

Robert Cottingham's latest series of works, "Robert Cottingham: An American

Alphabet," at the Ridgefield Museum of Contemporary Art until April 20,

surrounds the viewer with letters taken from neon signs across the country.

Whether viewed individually or taken as a whole, the exhibit is a presentation

of one artist's perception of the symbols through which most languages in the

world can be communicated. Though the alphabet is applied throughout the

world, Mr Cottingham's alphabet, as the show's title suggests, is distinctly

American.

Arranged - how else? - alphabetically across three walls of one of the

museum's second floor galleries are the 26 final oils on canvas Mr Cottingham

painted for "An American Alphabet." The gallery's front walls present the

gouache studies, all done in 1993, from which the oils took shape. In an

adjoining room are six preliminary graphite drawings, also from 1993, upon

which Mr Cottingham based some of the gouache studies.

The letters depicted in "An American Alphabet" do not all stand up straight

and face forward. Some are tilted towards the viewer, others away; some are

slanted to the left or right; some are partially obscured or somewhat cropped

so that the full letter is not within sight; and a few are a combination of

these elements.

In presenting the letters individually, the artist has suggested that there is

more to a scene than what a viewer is seeing. While each canvas presents one

letter on which to focus, a few give the (correct) impression that these

letters are part of a larger arrangement.

Mr Cottingham enjoys cropping. Only the essence of what is needed makes it

into any painting, nothing more. With the alphabet series, this device gives

the letters a sense of dislocation, while also being simple and direct.

"Alphabet," the artist says, is an ode to America. "Strange artifacts," the

artist calls the signs from which the 26 paintings were culled. The neon sign

is American imagery.

"What are these about? I don't like to analyze, whatever comes out is a

surprise to me, but there is some logic evidently, some direction to all of

these. On a personal basis, there is an excitement, there is a search for

things left behind," said Mr Cottingham.

"They're strange artifacts. In a way, they're sort of ridiculous. The fact

that somebody would go through the trouble to fabricate something out of tin

and neon and glass, chain, cable... whatever it took to keep these things

hanging up there, and for what? Just to announce that this was a place they

could go to for a movie, or shirts, or tires. And so there is a silliness to

it.

"But at the same time ... they were important. And their day is over," he

said. "There is a slight resurgence, but they will never really come back."

All of the signs depicted existed at one point somewhere in the country. Mr

Cottingham can recall where each letter comes from, but, he says, the idea

behind the series as a whole is its imagery.

"To me, it's not important which city each is from," he contends.

Nevertheless, for the very curious, the closest sign Connecticut viewers could

seek out is the one which contains Mr Cottingham's C. The letter comes from a

movie theatre marquee in Fairfield.

More than half of the alphabet series can be traced back to paintings Mr

Cottingham already had in his oeuvre, large-scale paintings of full buildings

with their neon signs intact.

While he has presented the letters realistically, some of their colors were

changed while painting. The P, for instance, was originally part of a red

sign. But red, the artist says, was already the most visible color in the

series. So the red P became a green P for "American Alphabet."

"Sometimes I wonder if I was thinking pea green when I was doing this one," he

said.

30 Years Of Painting

Robert Cottingham has lived in Newtown since 1977, when he and his wife Jane,

an antiques dealer and collector, purchased the former Blackman Farm. The

property, originally built up in 1758, was a working dairy farm until 1971. Mr

Cottingham uses three of the property's buildings for his studios.

A painter for nearly 30 years, Mr Cottingham's work has been exhibited widely

across the country for well over two decades. His work is in collections in

the United States, Europe and Asia.

Mr Cottingham's works have always been very realistic in nature, but should

not be considered photorealism. Where photorealism strives to re-create the

look of a photograph, paintings in turn convey a scene in their own approach.

The longer one views a Cottingham painting, the more apparent it becomes this

is not a photograph, but a painted creation one is viewing.

Mr Cottingham's series in the past have covered oil trucks, Hollywood

bungalows, railroad logos. Many of his early works - the oil trucks series,

for example - possess a monochromatic quality, but after the wife of a film

director friend commissioned Mr Cottingham to paint the Twentieth Century Fox

logo for the film director's birthday, it was as if the proverbial lightbulb

had lit up inside the artist's head.

"Suddenly, color! I [had been] very hesitant about color," he said. "I felt

ill at ease using too much color, so I tried to control myself." Fortunately

the painter got over that fear. Today's works shout out with color. They are

soaked with bright, sharp primary and secondary colors, even within a

painting's shadows.

The first time Mr Cottingham realized a single digit could be central to a

work of art was upon his first viewing of a Charles Demuth painting, years

ago, which shows the number 5 painted in gold.

"Now I'm thinking this may have been the starting point for my alphabet, for a

single letter," the artist said. This was also his first exposure to

photorealism.

In creating the "Alphabet" series, Mr Cottingham has bridged two worlds. He

has presented abstract reality, following in the footsteps of Marsden Hartley

or Stuart Davis. Mr Cottingham's letters are identifiable symbols, yet taken

out of context. In his collages Mr Hartley would base his abstractions on

recognizable symbols, while Mr Davis took a lighter approach in painting

cities and signage.

Mr Cottingham lived in Los Angeles during the mid 1960s. It was during this

time he began to appreciate what was going on in the world around us, above

eye level. Not in the doorways or on the streets, but looking just above the

first floor level was, he says, "a whole world of communication... letters

that were, I felt, monumental and also very American."

A Retrospective

On March 2, Mr Cottingham presented a slide lecture, a retrospective of his

work, at the Aldrich Museum. The hour-long program moved very quickly, with

the artist offering a light dialogue peppered with stories behind individual

works and series he has created during his successful career.

Before beginning the program, Mr Cottingham admitted that while putting the

presentation together he noticed a number of recurring images within his own

works, portions of his art that were unintentional connectors when viewed

separately, but that pulled works of different series together when seen

chronologically. Other artists have also recognized this trend in their own

works - unplanned, recurring themes.

"As you get older," he said, "you start to pick up ideas that, when you look

back at older work, you see there was something started 10, 15, 20 years ago

that you abandoned.

"Maybe it's just one little clock that appears in one painting, and you spot

it and think, `Oh God, I was thinking of that 20 years ago and I didn't do

anything with it,' but then it comes back."

Mr Cottingham called these resurging ideas arcs that sometimes come together

to form a larger series.

"I'm wondering if at some point a bigger group than ever before will come

together, which would probably give me my most successful work. I don't know

how or when it will come about, but it seems to have a kind of configuration."

A `Sunday Morning'

Would Change His Life

At the age of 12, Robert Cottingham visited the Whitney Museum of American Art

for the first time. It was then he first viewed Edward Hopper's "Early Sunday

Morning," which turned out to be a seminal moment in the young man's life.

"There was definitely a force. For the first time, I was not just seeing a

picture of something, which I always thought paintings were. In this case it

was a new language, a silent language. It was speaking to me. It's very

difficult for me, even now, to articulate what that was. But I remember the

strength of that."

It took him 16 years to "get going" after seeing the Hopper work, but looking

back, that was the starting point. Whether he was predestined to become a

realist painter is unknown, he admits, but seeing that painting at that moment

determined for Mr Cottingham that he would spend his life painting his urban

background.

That day also determined not only what he would paint, but how he would

approach it: Mr Cottingham has always been a realist painter, never abstract.

"It was an event that changed my life. I remember that moment very clearly."

It was while he and his wife were living in London that Mr Cottingham applied

for and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1974. Returning to

America, he then took a cross-country trek via Greyhound busses, photographing

classic signs of the past, which were quickly disappearing.

Concentrating on the Northeast, Mr Cottingham visited 27 cities during this

journey. Part of the result of that grant is what viewers see in "Alphabet":

The grant allowed Mr Cottingham the opportunity to create thousands of slides,

which he still uses.

In 1993, according to an essay by the Aldrich exhibit curator Richard Klein, a

fellowship at MacDowell Colony "allowed the artist to develop the first

drawings and gouache studies for the alphabet project."

It was not until well into the development of the "Alphabet" series - and no,

he did not work alphabetically - that Mr Cottingham discovered the driving

force for these works.

After having finished a number of canvases, the artist began running into

storage problems in his studio. Completed canvases were leaning against all

available wall space and were, Mr Cottingham said, in danger of becoming

damaged.

"To protect them," he said, "I hung them as a group on one wall: Four canvases

high by four across ... a total of 16 canvases that reached to the ceiling and

formed a mosaic of letter forms. This arrangement of tightly-packed images

created an energy that I hadn't anticipated."

What the artist saw when he looked at his studio wall that morning returned

him to his childhood, back to moments when he, at age nine or ten, and his

father would be ascending the steps on Saturday mornings from the subway in

Manhattan, where they had traveled from their home in Brooklyn. The first

glimpse was always of Times Square, Mr Cottingham wrote in his introduction to

the exhibit catalogue, "and, above us, the signs and billboards of a size not

seen in Brooklyn. It was a powerful experience.

"I believe that this newest series springs directly from these memories."