TitleRolling Stock Series No. 22 for Bill
Artist
Robert Cottingham
(American, b. 1935)
Date1992
MediumColor collograph and etching on white Arches Cover paper
DimensionsSheet size: 48 × 68 in.
Plate size: 40 × 60 in.
Framed: 50 1/2 × 70 × 2 in.
EditionEdition of 40
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "COTTINGHAM 1992".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Panczenko, 1994
Object number1994.38
Label TextAs a leader of the resurgent realist movement that emerged in the late 1960s known as photorealism, Robert Cottingham was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied advertising and graphic design at the Pratt Institute in the early 1960s. It wasn't until the artist was in his late-twenties that he began painting and combined his interest in advertising and graphic design with the then pervasive Pop Art, to develop a specialty in rendering the variety of signage, still a subject of his work today. Like many of the other photorealist painters, Cottingham uses the camera to capture images from which he composes first a pencil drawing and sometimes a watercolor before working up the subject in oil paint. The artist has said of the term photorealism: "I feel it applies to my work only in the sense that I use the camera as a starting point for my painting. I am certainly not attempting to duplicate the photograph."In addition to being known as a painter, Cottingham is an accomplished printmaker and has worked in a variety of media. In the late 1980s that artist undertook a series of works depicting railroad imagery, transforming otherwise industrial objects into documents of the past in his "Rolling Stock Series." "Rolling Stock Series No. 22 for Bill" was created both as a large painting and a print and illustrates the artist's interest in the textured and complex machinery of the box car. This print is also a technical achievement as it combines etching and color collagraph, which entails printing on a paper support as opposed to copper or other metal plate. It required twenty-five colors, seven plates, and innumerable passes through the press to create the final image.
