<![CDATA[Julia Cooper - nothing is written]]>

<![CDATA[Julia Cooper - nothing is written]]>Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:28:36 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Good News, Everyone!]]>Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:54:58 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2011/03/good-news-everyone.htmlGood lord, I'm terrible at this! Well, I hope you got good and attached to the unique, inspiring nature of Portland, because I don't live there anymore! Once again I have relocated, this time to Washington, D.C. It's on the cusp of spring here, and with the coming of the cherry blossoms I hope to be ensconced in my own apartment, but at this point I'm staying with my lovely grandmother. All my art supplies (and books, and movies, and CORN HOLDERS) are locked up tight in a storage space in Baltimore, which wasn't bothering me much (except when I tried to eat corn on the cob) until today, when I went to the National Gallery. Besides the much-touted Gauguin show, which didn't really wow me, I had a transcendent experience. (My favorite Gauguin painting, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and everything else pales in comparison.) I saw several Jasper Johns, three beautiful Rothkos, a couple of amazing Matisses, and a whole room of Calder sculptures that were each lit from several sources, so they cast double and triple shadows in the coolest way! I also bought a book about Lichtenstein, because I always like his work and feel like I should know more about it, since he dealt so heavily in borrowed imagery and "non-art." In fact, on the inside cover of the book I bought is this quote:

"All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons."

Well, that pretty much says it! This whole day is turning me into an idea machine. I'm going to have to go borrow a pencil and some printer paper from my grandmother, even my SKETCHBOOKS are locked away in storage! This is torture! One lovely thing is that one of my Christmas presents this year was an extremely generous gift certificate to Utrecht, so as soon as I have the space I'm going to go buy some BIG canvases. I'm sick of making minute paintings! Time to make some windows you could step through.

]]><![CDATA[My Education]]>Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:06:19 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2010/08/my-education.htmlI always wanted to be an artist. Sadly, there was no Picasso-level precocity, but I certainly spent a large part of my childhood creating. My parents were incredibly supportive, as was my first art teacher, Pam Golden. She was my teacher for ten years, and she left me with three indelible beliefs.
1: There is no such thing as a mistake in art. Well, of course there is - I'm not happy when I drop a glob of paint on a finished surface. But every mistake leads to something else. Mistakes are discoveries. This lesson was drilled into me at a very young age and I surrendered to it completely. It's the lens through which I view my whole life. It gives me permission to do stupid things like quit my job and move to a new city with no prospects. How's that working out, you ask? Well, I'm still alive!
2. Spirals are meaningful. Pam was crazy about spirals, and this communicated itself to me. I mentally link my Montessori education with spirals. They're aesthetically pleasing, of course, but they're also labyrinths, mazes. They're both simple and complicated. Drawing a spiral can become an act of meditation, a small movement that smoothly grows, a ripple. They're mandala-like.
3. Blue mascara is cool. All throughout my childhood I was mesmerized by Pam's blue mascara. She had very light red hair, and the awesome contrast of her blue lashes seemed to me the essence of bohemian artiness. I don't wear makeup often, but the only mascara I own is blue.

I was going to go on to talk about college, but this has gotten too long! Part two will have to come later.

]]><![CDATA[I'm Crafty]]>Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:53:27 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2010/07/im-crafty.htmlHere I am in Portland. It's a very nice city, with incredibly pleasant weather, so don't believe what people tell you! This summer has been a succession of perfect, cloudless 85 degree days, which I occasionally dip my toes into in the form of a stroll through Mt. Tabor park, a diminuitive former volcano which now provides encouraging vistas of Portland's water sources. More often, I huddle inside, crocheting and trying to convince myself to pick up a brush.

Yes, I'm once again feeling the artist's version of writer's block. Some things never change. Luckily, I've managed to convince myself that my former procrastinatory pasttime, crocheting, can be a form of art! I've always loved "outsider art" - check out the Baltimore Museum of Visionary Art if you're there, it's incredible! - and I especially like those crazy people who treat crafts as though they're art. Crafts are generally looked down on by the art community, although I think this is changing - Ghada Amer is one example of a celebrated fine artist who has integrated a "craft" - embroidery - into her art very successfully. I've even seen examples of artists who have worked with crochet - Patricia Waller and Shauna Richardson are two examples. Obviously, their work is in a very different vein from mine, but I'm still happy to see it.

All the artists I've mentioned are women. I think it's a pretty straightforward statement for female artists to appropriate a traditional "woman's craft" and "misuse" it in some way - by creating gory stuffed animals or embroidering pornographic images. This was certainly in my mind when I began crocheting movie lines, although the "statement" I'm making isn't really something I want to say, but rather something I am. I like to crochet - I like movies that are traditionally marketed towards guys. This isn't because I'm a freak, but because Hollywood seems to think women can't enjoy a good explosion, and would rather see two insipid brides dye each other's hair blue. Untrue! She's All That is probably as close as I'll get to a "chick flick" quote. I try to pick quotations that actively clash with the medium of crochet, because it's more interesting, and because it's hilarious to crochet "fuck." I'm constantly paranoid that a little old grandma is going to come over and ask what I'm making.

Ultimately, I'd like to combine these wall hangings with painting in some way. The Damien drawing with a crocheted frame is a tentative stab at that, though I don't think I'm quite there yet. I read Robert Rauschenberg's biography again, and I'm obsessed with combining EVERYTHING. But for now, I'm here. And look, it's sunny out again! Maybe I'll go to the park and crochet.

]]><![CDATA[Just Checking In]]>Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:35:44 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2010/02/just-checking-in.htmlIt's been a while since I've written anything, and with good reason - I've been busy! I moved up to Portland, OR right after the holidays, and by now I'm fairly ensconced. I hated to leave my studio behind, but now that I'm working from home I'm getting a lot more accomplished! Except in the whole interacting-with-people aspect. I reorganized the site a bit, to make it less cluttered, and I put up a bunch of new art.

The photos are something I started working on very recently. For pure laziness' sake, I'll just cut and paste a paragraph out of my artist statement:

The photographs Julia uses in her series are all of strangers. She finds them in junk stores and antique malls, abandoned or lost by the people who once treasured them. By altering them she gives them new context, invents a new story for them to tell. She reuses images, often recognizable, from old entertainment magazines because she enjoys the private preconceptions that people connect with images they recognize. Anyone looking at one of her photographs can create his or her own story, and someone whose image was lost in the bottom of a filing cabinet gets to live a new life.

Borrowed imagery is something that really appeals to me, which is why I've really been getting into pop art and post-abstract-expressionism lately. I read biographies of Warhol and Rauschenberg, both of course incredibly interesting artists, if intimidating in their total brilliance. But I want my stuff to be a little more personal than theirs. There aren't really any movements anymore. Everyone does their own thing, and mine is pretty autobiographical, even if I'm appropriating images that belong to the general public.

The paintings are still pretty straight-up portraits. I'm thinking of sticking some collage in there, or some crochet, but right now I'm really enjoying the specific focus. If I don't paint a portrait of Commander Riker, who will?

]]><![CDATA[Yarn]]>Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:41:35 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2010/01/yarn.htmlI want to make things with yarn. To begin with.
I'm sort of seesawing here, in terms of content. When I left college, it took me a year to even pick up a paintbrush. Part of that was circumstance, part was fear, part was overwhelmedness. Is that a word? It is now. College pulped me up and reformed me, art-wise. It opened my head up to a whole new woooorld of artistic possibility. However, with education comes a loss of spontaneity, innocence, I suppose, ease. The stuff that makes so much outsider art amazing. Not that I would consider myself an outsider artist before I went to Bennington. But I was shockingly ignorant about not only contemporary art, but most art post-impressionism. Any paintings and drawings I did were straight-up portraits or still-lives and I didn't think about the subject matter for a second.
And I painted dozens of paintings throughout high school. In college, dumped into an environment of intense introspection and historical connotation and meaning, I didn't paint a single thing in four years that I care to look at now.
So the first thing I painted after college (a year after college) was an acrylic painting of Zac Efron. I painted it in a day, on the floor of my den, while watching tv. And it galvanized me. It was so much fun! I haven't stopped producing art since.
But at this point, after two years in Los Angeles, on the brink of moving to a strange new city and focusing on art full-time, I'm feeling once again a strange urge to be "meaningful." To think about what I'm painting. To create things that no one understands except me. To make things with yarn.

my hairline: the only constant in the universe

]]><![CDATA[Just my luck (wherein I am played by Lindsay Lohan)]]>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:52:35 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2009/12/just-my-luck-wherein-i-am-played-by-lindsay-lohan.htmlI had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Back to the East Coast, where every cold sting of wind filled me with euphoria! Sure, it's nice to have blue skies 99% of the time, to never have to wonder what the temperature is, to still have a valet ticket from three months ago stuck in my windshield wiper because it NEVER RAINS (and I'm lazy). But California is just not for me. I enjoy weather too much. Besides, I haven't yet seen skies to rival the ones at home.

In addition to wonderful family, incredibly delicious food, and gorgeous skies, I've seen a lot of wonderful art lately. I went gallery-hopping, which I should do more often, since it always makes me feel like certain things are possible. I saw paintings by Edward del Rosario, truly incredible. Certain things by Robert Williams I found terribly creepy, while others gave me a lot of ideas. Then I channeled Lindsay Lohan in that terrible luck movie. About to go home, I instead went into one more gallery on a whim. They happened to be having a show of Chagoya's recent work. That would be Chagoya, who has been, for several years, my favorite living artist. It was so awesome to suddenly stumble across this room filled with art of his that I had never seen before! It felt like magic. I felt so, so lucky. Especially because his work isn't all over the place - the only other time I've seen it in person is the first time I heard about him, I think in the art book room at the Clark, or the Williams College museum. A college printmaking trip. The art book room had something by him - if I remember correctly, one of his codexes. It's not even that easy to find images of his stuff online. So happening upon a gallery that represents him was huge. I bought a catalogue of his work.
So basically I've been thinking a lot about art, but not doing much! That will all change in the next week. I have a very busy month or so coming up, so I want to get as much art in this week as possible.

]]><![CDATA[More Star Trek! And Musings on Meaning]]>Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:46:18 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2009/11/more-star-trek-and-musings-on-meaning.htmlTwo new pieces are up! These paintings just flew together, proof of how quickly I can work when I'm really excited about what I'm doing. These continue the Star Trek theme; I recently discovered Wil Wheaton's delightful reviews of early TNG episodes and I guess I've been thinking a lot about that world and how much I love it. But I'm branching out! Besides the aforementioned Rubies, I've been working on some other tracings:

I like working this way because I can bring my tracing paper home at night and draw while watching a movie or something, and then go into my studio the next morning and incorporate what I've drawn directly into a painting. It's a fast way of working, it gets across what I'm trying to get across, and it's stylistically more interesting than a straight painting.

Now, I know what you're thinking (or what I'm thinking in my deepest subconscious): branching out? Why, Julia, you've already done a million Zac Efron paintings, Point Break paintings, and even a Ruby Keeler painting! What's next: another painting of your sister?
And in turn, I turn to myself and say, No! You don't understand! No one understands me! I'm building a LANGUAGE here! When I reference Point Break in a painting, for example, I'm really talking about brotherhood and the pain of love torn asunder. Zac Efron, in my ouvre, is the Christ figure, a paragon of perfection in imperfect times. Ruby Keeler could represent the innocence of times past.....a talentless, off-key, wooden-shoe-wearing emblem of times past.

....well, she COULD. If I really felt like explaining myself to myself. But I don't! So let's just say there are certain themes I like to return to again and again. Hitchcock had overbearing mothers - I have Point Break.

]]><![CDATA[I Only Have Eyes For You....]]>Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:08:58 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2009/11/i-only-have-eyes-for-you.htmlTonight's been productive, as far as I'm concerned. I spent part of the day looking through old notebooks from my senior year art classes, and reading journal entries I made during that time and just after graduation. I was reminded of brainstorms and ideas I'd totally forgotten about. Hopefully, in a few years, I'll stumble upon this blog and it will fulfill the same purpose!
One thing I was reminded of was how much I experimented with tracings in my junior and senior years, to various effects. I pulled out my handy pad of tracing paper today, and magic shot from my fingertips like some sort of strange energy field! Before I knew it, four lovely Wesleys lay before me. (Pictures soon!)
I took my tracing paper home from the studio, and tonight, during two consecutive viewings of Desperado (commentary off, then on), I maniacally traced Rubies. Part of me wants to consider tracing a form of cheating, and I probably would if I was just going to take the tracings and hang them on the wall. But they're building blocks to a bigger piece of art. Tracing is just another form of duplication in this case, like photocopy transfers, except with more handwork going into the duplicates. I also love the layering possibilities presented by the transparency of the tracing paper.
Tracing is comparatively mindless, so the parts of my brain that weren't concerned with getting Ruby's inane expression right or listening to Robert Rodriguez's brilliance or admiring Antonio Banderas' shooting skills were pondering MEANING. On the car ride to my studio today, driving through a heavily latino neighborhood, I started to think about culture, and how much inspiration I get from Mexican art, though I have no ties to their heritage. Do I have a right to borrow that aesthetic, or the ideas behind it? America is such a young country, and we have no long-standing identity. Our modern identity is one I struggle to eschew when abroad. My own cultural heritage is pretty white-bread - I have no deep connection to my Jewish heritage, though I've found Chagall to be incredibly inspiring partially because of the way he incorporates religion into his work. I've talked a lot, and in college written a lot, about how through painting I'm building my own religion, setting up my favorite actors and artists, pop culture figures, as deities. In college, a lot of the aesthetics of my work were drawn from both Medieval religious art and Mexican votives. I feel like I've moved away from that to an extent. At this point, it feels more cultural than religious. I'm building around myself a cultural language. A lot of it references other cultures, but a lot is American. I mean, what is more American than Point Break? (Though hey, the climactic parachute scene takes place over Mexico!)
Today at my studio, and tonight while watching Desperado, (more Mexico! My subconscious was really working tonight!....or perhaps Mexico is just a great place for shootouts) I thought a lot about Andy Warhol. It was impossible not to, while working on a painting tentatively titled "Ten Rubies." I'm not as obsessed with celebrity as Warhol was - my choice of subjects is a lot more personal than his Marilyns or Jackies, (Ruby Keeler instead of Angelina Jolie, for example) and hence the paintings I make will be a lot less universal. But I remember reading in a biography of Warhol that he was obsessed with the movies and was absolutely referencing religious art when he created his modern icons. I had admired, but never really liked his art before; once I read that, everything clicked into place. I got it. So I'm glad that these tracing paper duplicates reference that language, because there's definitely a similar idea behind them.
I don't really expect anyone to read all of this, it's more for my own reference in a few months (or tomorrow) when I start feeling all dispirited and think my art has no direction or purpose.

Oh, yeah. Dave Foley crept in there. I guess I reference Canadian culture, too.

]]><![CDATA[Sore Arm Part Two: The Sorening. Struggling not to make an incomprehensible Star Trek joke here.]]>Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:32 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2009/10/sore-arm-part-two-the-sorening-struggling-not-to-make-an-incomprehensible-star-trek-joke-here.html
Yet again, my arm is killing me! But this time, it's from a delightful evening of bowling. Regular bowling balls are a lot heavier than those of the candlepin variety! Magically, I've spent a month doing nothing worthy of my art blog! Well, to be fair, I've been wrestling with many real-life problems, the outcome of these internal struggles being that it seems I'm moving to Portland in a month or so. It's not exactly the East Coast destination I had hoped for, but at least it shares a name with an East Coast city. Oh, I jest. I hear that Portland has a young art scene rivaled only by its meth scene, not to mention buckets of rain! Strange to be sick of sunlight. Well, I'm never sick of sunlight. I'm sick of static weather. Portland may not be the best solution to that problem, but for a while it'll do!
On the art front, I've been working on several things, but nothing has reached the finished stage. A few things are coming close, and the prospect of updating my website is a delightful motivator! How depressing.
I really want to start doing some more paper art. I've been looking at a lot of drawings I admire, and I'm able to loosen up with charcoal in a way I can't with other mediums. A lot of my ideas I feel don't need an entire painting devoted to them, especially the themed "sets" I keep thinking of. Painting out all these ideas simply takes too much time. I think drawing/mixed media would be a good compromise. And there's almost nothing I love more than making a huge charcoal mess!
By this time next month I'll be firmly on the path to the next stage of my life. I fully expect to have a mazillion more things to upload here!]]><![CDATA[Sore arm.]]>Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:15:28 -0800http://www.juliavcooper.com/1/post/2009/09/sore-arm.htmlYou know what's annoying? When you're working on a painting, but you can't talk about it or put pictures of it on the internet because it's a gift and must be kept hidden from the world until CHRISTMAS. Shhhh, it's like it only exists in my mind!

I'm also moving forward with my dialogue paintings. I spent four hours straight lettering the other day, and my shoulders are SORE. A sneak peak:

It still needs to be cleaned up. Also, I was so motivated to begin that I didn't give as much thought to my colors as I should have, and ended up with an unfortunate Dunkin Donuts / Juno effect. In the future, I'll actually put some consideration into it! The idea is to have it be pleasing (or at least interesting) to the eye from afar, a general impression of color and shape, and then resolve into dialogue as the viewer approaches. The conflict between the two characters (almost all the dialogue I've chosen is an intense moment between two people) should be reflected in the tension between the colors, the way they control different parts of the conversation, and canvas. Ok, is that enough Senior Review language for you? Sometimes I don't know if I even mean what I'm saying, or if my brain was forced by art-school environment to make an unfortunate evolutionary leap.
Well, I'm off to read "The Good War"! Only 12 years after it was assigned in school. Sorry, Christopher!

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