Three White Tanks
1993
Stephen J. Dolmatch (b. 1956)
Gouache on paper, 14 1/2 X 28
Signed lower right: S. Dolmatch 9/93
Gift of the artist, 95.142

 

The panoramic prospect of Brooklyn and Queens from the Kosciusko Bridge, which carries the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway across the Newtown Creek, encompasses factories, warehouses, and oil storage tanks. Until the mid-nineteenth century the area, known as Laurel Hill, was mostly farms, some of which had been established as early as the seventeenth century by Dutch settlers. The construction of the Laurel Hill Chemical Works in 1866 marked the beginning of alterations in the landscape from rural to industrialized. As business increased, the Chemical Works added one factory after another, until by 1882 it occupied an entire block and was the largest plant of its type in the country. In the ensuing years, other similar industries arrived in the neighborhood, until Laurel Hill entirely lost its bucolic aspect. In this view, some of the low buildings and the smokestacks visible at the left resemble a drawing of the Laurel Hill Chemical Works in History of Queens; they may well be the same buildings serving a different, modern function.¹

Stephen Dolmatch has focused on the striking juxtaposition of tanks and layered rooftops in a dramatic off-center composition emphasized by the posts along the right edge, thus transforming an otherwise prosaic industrial vista into a complex study of color and shape. The scene's severe geometry of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal is relieved by a small patch of green trees and the soft depiction of distant buildings on the horizon. Light -in this case the clear, saturating light of mid-afternoon -is a governing element in Dolmatch's work.

Although he earns his living as a lawyer, Dolmatch received a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Amherst College and has been an artist ever since. In addition to practicing law, he teaches painting at New York's Parsons School of Design.

Notes:

 1  History of Queens County (New York: W. W. Munsell, 1882), p. 276.