Edwin Dickinson
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EDWIN DICKINSON was born at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1891. He went to New York City in 1910 to study at Pratt Institute. The following year he studied with Chase at the Art Students League, and then went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he worked with Charles W. Hawthorne during the summers of 1912-14. He lived in Provincetown until 1917 when his painting was interrupted by two years' service in the U. S. Navy. After the war he painted for a year in Italy, Spain and France, then returned to live in Provincetown. Two winters were spent in Buffalo, New York, teaching, and in 1937-38 he painted again in Europe. Since 1944 he has taught during the winter in New York, returning to his home on Cape Cod each summer. He visited Europe again in 1952.
Dickinson spends long periods of time on a single composition, slowly elaborating its many elements into a final whole that has the mysterious quality of a vision, an atmosphere of suspense and hallucination. He does not care to write about his work. When pressed for explanations, he willingly identifies objects and figures in his pictures, but throws no light upon the essential mystery of their juxtapositions or the meaning of the symbols. At first glance these complex paintings with their recurrent motifs--foreshortened nudes, a blue rose, fiery coals, rocks falling through space--suggest literary associations or a surrealist attitude. But closer study reveals that this is a completely visual world, dense with objects which, though not easy to identify, come out of exact and searching observation. With purely plastic means Dickinson plays with light and shade and perspective as boldly as the artists of the baroque, and this play he has complicated and enriched through discontinuity in the handling of form and color, here holding and defining forms in clear articulation by light and perspective, there arbitrarily tearing them with shadow and impinging objects, or drifting them away from anchored fact through clouds of paint that turn defining edges into mist and illusion.
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