TitleRoxy
Artist
Robert Cottingham
(American, b. 1935)
Date2002
MediumColor lithograph on white wove paper
DimensionsSheet size: 46 x 46 1/16 in.
Image size: 41 15/16 x 42 1/16 in.
Edition6/30
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "COTTINGHAM 2002".
Signed in graphite at LL: "ROXY VII/XXX"
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, July 14, 2005
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number2005.5
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 American signage. 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."Cottingham made his New York debut in 1971 at the O.K. Harris Gallery, which was showing other photorealist artists at that time including Robert Bechtle, Ralph Goings, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, and John Salt. The subjects of most of these early works were signs that the artist had seen from various parts of the country. These signs have been the subject of numerous paintings and prints by the artist and "Roxy" is taken from the old Roxy Arcade that was located in Times Square. Cottingham often crops the image in such a way to emphasize a particular angle or view. He has stated: "I'm not particularly interested in documentation, although I think there is a certain documentary aspect to my work. It's unavoidable because of the degree of realistic depiction involved and by the nature of the subject matter. It's a vision exclusive to the century and is fading fast."
