James Cooper

Suggestive of the American modernism Precisionism movement, the work is characterized by the reduction of compositions to simple shapes and underlying geometrical structures, with clear outlines, minimal detail, unexpected viewpoints and framing, and an emphasis on the abstract form of the subject. Precisionists paintings, drawings, and prints also showed the influence of recent work by American photographers, such as Paul Strand, and the style is evident in Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs, from 1950s through the 1980s of barns, their interlocking forms evoking the planes of his own paintings and sculptures. “Artist friends would say to me, snickering a little, ‘What can a camera do in making art. It is just a camera’. Then one of them asks for help in making an image with a camera (a backlit telephone pole with just the foot pegs lit). We made it, he showed it at Otis (College of Art and Design) and people said ‘Wow, that’s cool’.”

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