Artist, Edwin Dickinson: Fall of 1911, I was living in Manhattan and decided to go to the Art Students League, which was the premier school in the country. I entered the still life class and painted a still life every day for seven months.
Narrator: That was the artist Edwin Dickinson speaking in the 1960s.
As a student, Dickinson was introduced to a painting technique known as premier coup, a French phrase meaning “first stroke” These types of paintings were done in a single sitting—sometimes even in a matter of hours. Instead of focusing on details, Dickinson was interested in the relationship between large areas of color.
Edwin Dickinson: There was no time in premier coup to do any underpainting of any kind. In the time you have, you have to decide pretty quickly what are the essential things that you should get at. And it was a very good going because everyone soon realized that the general would never come from the particular, but the particular was included in the general.
Narrator: Dedicating himself to making landscapes in the 1930s, Dickinson would wander through Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife.
Edwin Dickinson: The reliance on the nature of a sight seen, the necessity of looking back, diminishes sharply and quickly because the painting takes over. After a while, in one sitting of four hours, while the sun has gone over the meridian and the shadows are not where they were, you don’t need them because the canvas has taken hold.