Precisonism is a truly American form of painting, a style that could really not have been made anywhere else. The inspiration for the art was the country's industrial landscape. This was close in time to the second industrial revolution. Machines had been a part of the cultural landscape, but now more than ever before, major factories were popping up left and right. The term for the style of art was coined during the 20's, the movement itself is generally said to have happened after World War 1 in the inter-war period.

These factories and buildings were the inspiration for the art, and in a pretty direct way. These artistrs's canvases were filled with images of factories, smokestacks, machines and buildings. They weren't painted in a traditional realist style, but were not majorly abstract either. The inspriation for the style was largely cubism, the images in the paintings became somewhat choppy, depicting in pieces of hard edged, geometrical forms that end up almost giving the illusion of motion, of a wobbly building.

Edward Hopper's paintings are a great example of this as well as artists like Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth and Ralston Crawford. Perhaps most surprisingly, in Georgia O'Keefe's early work, architecture was often a subject making her one of the leading artists in this genre.

You might not recognize the name of Charles Demuth immediately, but his painting “I saw the Figure 5 in Gold” depicting an infinity of number 5's might ring some bells. Roberta Smith wrote of the work in the New York Times: "Demuth's famous visionary accounting of Williams, I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, [is] a painting whose title and medallion-like arrangement of angled forms were both inspired by a verse the poet wrote after watching a fire engine streak past him on a rainy Manhattan street while waiting for Marsden Hartley, whose studio he was visiting, to answer his door."

This lush image of a New York day is the heart, the feeling behind all of Precisionism. The genre was New York based and the feel to all of the work is uniquely urban, American urban. Even in the paintings of machinery,, buildings, factories and trains there is something strangely human, something familiar.. like the bustle of people and body buzz of energy that one gets when stepping into a major American city.

Let Oil Painting Express bring this urban edge to your home. A Precisionism painting makes the perfect gift for any friend or family member who moves away to a big city. But you don't need to be a city-dweller to appreciate Precisionism, but a replica of any of these paintings will inevitably please your inner urbanite.