Cottingham’s ‘Empire Theater’—

New Gallery Show Returns Local Artist

To His Origins

By Nancy K. Crevier

Even after a lifetime of recognition as one of America’s most renowned photo-realist painters, exhibitions around the world, and a level of fame that places his works in collections of notable museums across the country, Newtown artist Robert Cottingham is just as excited about his upcoming show, “The Empire Theater,” on view at Forum Gallery in New York City from February 24 through April 9, as he was for his first exhibition over four decades ago.

“I get excited anytime I do anything,” declared Mr Cottingham. “Anytime a painting is working, and I have a challenge, it’s exciting.”

“The Empire Theater” show consists of 11 images of the Empire Theater marquee, which once stood in Montgomery, Ala., at the site of what is now the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. The marquee, and the signage that stood above the marquee, are depicted in mediums that include graphite on vellum, watercolor, gouache, and two paintings, including one that measures nine feet wide, done in oil on canvas.

Following a successful career as an art director, Mr Cottingham gained notoriety in the 1960s and onward as a painter of what he calls “urban landscapes” — signage, items like manual typewriters and antique cameras, and even a series called “Rolling Stock,” consisting of box car images.

He is unsure in what his desire to paint iconic images is rooted.

“I think it has more to do with the environment in which the signs appeared and the memories associated with them. There was that sense that I’d seen them before. We were living in Los Angeles, at the time, and I remember I started seeing things differently, noticing the signage. You realize something is working on you,” he said.

Driving the Los Angeles freeways, too, he began to notice the oil tankers, and they, too, became the focus of a series on oil trucks, reflecting his fascination with light, color, and simple lines. His photo-realism style, he said, seems to straddle two genres: that of urban landscape, and that of still life.

“People used to complain that I never included people, that I never included figures in my paintings,” said Mr Cottingham. “It just didn’t work for me. I think, once, I include the tiniest suggestion of a person, but the figures are not a draw for me.”

Influenced by Edward Hopper, Mr Cottingham’s drawings and paintings emphasize light and shadows on a sign or object, subject matter to which the viewer can relate, and the use of color to draw the eye to the focal point. In the case of the Empire, it is the word itself, he said, that attracts the eye, whether rendered in pencil, watercolor, or oil.

The Empire series might never have come to be, said Mr Cottingham, had it not been for a random tour given him by a gallery assistant, over a decade ago, following his show at the Montgomery Museum of Art in Alabama.

“The director thought I should see this theater, so they drove me over,” he said. The attraction of the Empire Theater was that it was in front of this theater that the bus on which Rosa Parks rode in protest in 1955 had stopped, and police were called to arrest her.

“It was already derelict by that time, but I shot [photographs] for maybe 25 minutes, from all different angles,” said Mr Cottingham. The theater was subsequently torn down.

He had no intentions at the time for using the photographs as the basis of a series, and actually put them in a file, and forgot about them. Then the Film Society of Lincoln Center asked him to do a poster for the 46th New York Film Festival in 2008.

“I thought, ‘What images do I have?’” recalled Mr Cottingham. When he dug out the Empire photographs, he knew he had found the subject matter.

By the late 2000s, Mr Cottingham had moved away from the storefront signage that had brought him fame. Working on the silkscreen of the Empire for the poster brought back fond memories.

“As I’m painting, I’m thinking of days as a kid, going to the movies, and the theaters that we went to in Brooklyn, growing up. I did a lot of this kind of thing years ago. It was nice to revisit it,” he said.

Then, having worked on the Empire poster and having gotten results, he realized, “This should be a painting; this should go on canvas.”

From 2008 right up until earlier this month, Mr Cottingham produced works featuring the Empire marquee. He referred to the graphites, watercolors, and gouaches that are in the exhibit as “preparatory” pieces to the two oil paintings, but does not mean that they are rough sketches.

“Each becomes its own work of art. Pencil, watercolor, gouache are an opportunity for me to switch mediums,” the artist said.

He is enamored with whichever medium he happens to be working in, at the moment. If pressed, he prefers working with oil paints. However, he is equally enthralled with the woodcuts and lithographs of other subject matter that he is producing, and continual experimentation with pencil on paper. The most recent graphite that he submitted to the Forum Gallery for inclusion in the upcoming show reflects his new intensity of pencil work, he said. “It’s all about the tone, for me; the blacks and whites, and the grays in between. I get more and more seduced with working with pencil,” he confessed.

More Than The Marquee

Not one to put all of his eggs in one basket, Mr Cottingham has several other projects underway, including one that could have been the show at the Forum Gallery.

“It’s all ready to go,” he said. The paintings are based on photographs of images taken from an old book of engineering designs that he picked up years ago at a Friends of C.H. Booth Library Book Sale. He was taken with the mechanical shapes, and began re-drawing the designs, sometimes extracting only portions of the machine part. Then desiring to see the way in which light actually would reflect off of such shapes, Mr Cottingham constructed three-dimensional sculptures out of cardboard, painted the sculptures, and photographed the models.

“I’ve always loved taking an object and showing the three views. They were too primitive, though,” he said. Unsatisfied with those results, he hired a woodworker to craft and paint new sculptures. “We just painted them random colors, and I had this idea to put them against a plain background, photograph and paint them.”

The resulting nine oil paintings of the isolated machine parts will be in his next show, said Mr Cottingham. “I see a wrap up to this series, now, I think,” he said. Instead of the variously colored models he has used up to this point, he plans to paint wooden models black, and photograph them against a solid background. “I want to see how light plays against that,” he said. “I’m always playing with new ideas,” Mr Cottingham said.

Another series on which he is working is also nearing completion. Twelve years ago, he began creating a series of lithographs, each of one letter of the alphabet, taken from the context of the signage he had painted. The challenge he gave himself was to do it “only if I can do each letter as different as it could be from the other 25. I think I’ve been successful. It’s not just the style of letter, but the variety of materials used in the original sign, the neon, and the structure. Each one has its own character,” he said. The letters, from a curlicue neon L to a straightforward turquoise j and a slender red Z — whose shadow is the focal point — have been randomly selected as he worked his way through nearly every letter.

“I hope to be done by the end of 2011,” said Mr Cottingham.

Over the years, Mr Cottingham has also curated a number of shows. He is particularly proud of the collection he curated in 2008 at The Katonah Museum of Art in New York. “Here’s The Thing” was a collection of single objects by artists from across the country, a subject that is, naturally, dear to him.

In the meantime, despite the fact that it would seem that the Empire Theater series is a wrap — with the opening of the show imminent — he continues to develop new ideas for that exhibit. “I actually sent down the two oil paintings and the other works three months early, and I was so pleased with myself,” chuckled the artist. “Then I got it in my head that I needed one more.”

He started the third oil painting in early January, planning to finish it for the Forum Gallery exhibit. The nearly completed painting was perched on a gigantic easel in his barn studio recently, awaiting the finishing touches. But gallery visitors may not see this rendition of the Empire, said Mr Cottingham.

“It has a ways to go. I’ve decided I’m going to stop beating up on myself to complete it by the end of this month,” he said.

That does not mean that there will not be additions to the show, however. Laid out on a long table in an adjacent room to his studio was a sketch that will be the basis for a new watercolor of the Empire.

“I am noodling this idea,” he said, “of another watercolor. It is a more stretched version of the other watercolor, and of the silkscreen. We’ll see…”

Mr Cottingham is hopeful that visitors to the gallery will come away with an understanding of the process, and how each image comes into its own. Visitors to “The Empire Theater” will have to choose their own favorite from among the works, though, as Mr Cottingham cannot direct them to a favorite of his own.

“They are all,” he said, “my children.”

An opening reception for Robert Cottingham and “The Empire Theater” will take place Thursday, February 24, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, at Forum Gallery, 730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, New York City. The show will run through April 9.

The collection can be viewed at www.ForumGallery.com/CurrentSeason. For gallery hours call 212-355-4545.