Robert Cottingham- Artist Reference A01

Robert Cottingham is a Brooklyn painter who specialises in photorealism paintings of street signs and advertisements around cities. He uses distorted low angles to capture the signs in his paintings in order to play on the lighting, as to create shadows which give the signs an ambiguous effect. I like the muted, undertone colours mixed with bold colours in his images.

When editing my own photographs I will use a filter which gives the photographs a warmer tone to imitate Ed Fella's old-fashioned medium of polaroid, but I will not use an effect like Sepia (like in the image below) because I want to capture the colour in the photographs so my final pieces can be linked on visual colour as well as content and the colour will tie the piece together. However, I like how Cottingham has used the colour/effect used to give a sense of time for how old the signage/text is.

The composition of Robert Cottingham's work is very similar to Ed Fella's but Cottingham uses a wider selection of photographs in his pieces. In my own piece I will use a similar composition to this (two rows of images). The piece below includes both muted and bold colours like reds and oranges, while the brightness of the images is quite low, which give the images a sense of old entertainment signs, e.g. for cinemas, restaurants, bowling, etc, as this kind of signage which would need bright colours to attract people to visit but the colours of the signs have faded with time.