Word: dickinson
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...shapes and forms but areas of color: if the color was right, all else would follow. "Think of color instead of sand. Think of color instead of clothes. Color first and house after, not house first and color after," he said. Last week his most famous student, Edwin Dickinson, recalled: "More than anyone else, Hawthorne appreciated the fact that plane relationships are better expressed through comparative values of color than through drawing." Adds Abstractionist Hans Hofmann, who became a part of the Provincetown colony in 1934: "As a painter, Hawthorne cast aside every doctrine-so that he might surpass...
...Dickinson grew up in the Finger Lakes country of upstate New York, and his first ambition was to be a naval officer. Twice he applied for an appointment to Annapolis, twice flunked the math examination. As a child he had always sketched and drawn; he decided to make art his career. He studied at Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design. After a stint as a Navy radio operator during World War I, he lived briefly in Paris. The art world was popping with new group movements in those days, but Dickinson chose a path...
...most of all, El Greco. When it came to his own painting, he refused to be hurried, would go through hundreds of "sittings"-three-to four-hour stretches before the easel-to achieve what he wanted. With a lesser talent, the result might have been dry and academic. Under Dickinson's brush a mystic world of magic harmonies emerged...
...large (6 ft. 1 in. by 8 ft. 1 in.) Fossil Hunters was painted from life; he used models for the three figures, as well as yards of billowing draperies. But what interests Dickinson is never pure representation. It is impossible to tell just what the figures are doing; because of the wonders Dickinson performs with perspective, the figures seem to be lying down, standing, and floating under water all at once. The sea-green light, which seems to come from nowhere, falls not on the figures but on the folds of cloth, on a hand, on a death mask...
Precision or Abstraction. In his one-sitting paintings, mostly landscapes and seascapes done on Cape Cod, Dickinson is especially versatile at catching the highlights of a moment. He can do a cottage window that is both precise and geometrical, yet seems about to reveal some intriguing mystery. A seascape may be romantic and bathed in mist, while a painting of waves crashing upon some rocks can recede into abstraction. But Dickinson has still another side to him: oils that are pure dramatic invention. Such a work is his Ruin at Daphne...