Nite

Robert Cottingham creates paintings and prints of urban signs, marquees, railroad boxcars, letter forms, and vintage objects he has encountered and photographed. His close cropping of visual elements—for example a single letter in a sign—and his careful delineation and arrangement of colored shapes and fields add a veil of abstraction to his otherwise realistic images. “Nite” depicts a portion of an elaborate neon marquee. The color woodcut was printed from nine blocks by Karl Hecksher, an expert in this printmaking method. Cottingham often revisits iconic examples of his work in different print mediums, and this is the case with “Nite”: he reprised the image in a square-format screen print for his 2009 portfolio “American Signs.”