Fairfield Porter on Edwin Dickinson
Dickinson makes the most out of the least, especially in Winter Woods, Wellfleet, or View of Green Island. Least is, green, flat ground and blue-green sky; or an impression of trees that gives, with trained simplicity, a single essential for landscape, namely, the presence of nature. In these little paintings, or quick ones, he is in touch with an elusive, and fleeting, essentiality. In his large exhibition pieces, he is in touch with not entirely coordinated ideas of art. In the large paintings, he expresses, like an inadequate classicist, the limitations of a formality that originates outside himself; in the small paintings he has been able to surrender to his deepest self which has a profounder form than the form one can know and understand. It is a form that does not impose itself on his subjects, nor is it outside them. Chekhov said he wrote about the inkwell, and in the same way, in Dickinson’s small paintings, there is none of the manipulation of the artist who has lost contact with himself. (Art in Its Own Terms, p. 118-20.)
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By the way, Fairfield Porter remains one of the best writers on painting that I know. It's a point of view that comes from intelligent seeing, rather than from theory, and always about the experience of standing before the work. Today especially this is invaluable--although sometimes so simple-seeming that we take it for granted. Porter was also a painter, recognized somewhat belatedly. The tensions in his own work between plan and immediacy (the same distinction made in the quote posted) is one that we've talked about as well.
Porter's essays can be found in "Art on Its Own Terms", edited by Rackstraw Downes, also a painter. There's a very good biography of Porter by Justin Spring--I recommend it.
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