I've got a million different things on the burner right now, including close to a dozen half-painted canvases clogging my studio - some started as long ago as 2013! But there are a couple of more recent works occupying me right now. Though I consider myself primarily a portraitist (insofar as I can consider myself anything after not working for four years [must stop beating myself up!]) I've been branching out into other styles lately. What amazes me about abstract artists is how they manage to create non-representational works that mean something specific - and how utterly I fail to do so when I try. To me, abstract art is like poetry, completely out of reach - it's like being on a huge, windy plain, with no fences or walls or anything to guide me. How can anything mean something when anything could mean EVERYTHING? So, perhaps abstract art is not for me. Although I can't shake the sense that if I ever really sorted myself out, I could find it. Another subject matter - landscapes. I used to find them, almost without exception, deadly boring. I could appreciate Canaletto's perfectly sparkling Venetian scenes, and of course Winslow Homer appealed to my New England nature, but most other offerings I found lacking. In college I took an art history class on Romanticism, it being the only one offered that term. It was fascinating to be confronted with the knowledge that I just hadn't been looking closely enough. Caspar David Friedrich, for example, painted fairly dreary paintings of ruined churches overrun by twisting vines and huge, lurking trees. Grey, dead scenes. I was taught to look beyond the basic, to see that by choosing this subject matter Friedrich was making a comment on the fragility of man and his beliefs, and the all-consuming power of nature and time. I loved it. Then I forgot about it for almost ten years. For the past few months, I've been engaged in researching and writing about the evolution of Romanticism in art and how it applies to the modern day. To that end, I've been trying my hand at landscape painting, tweaking to fit my thesis - that the modern translation of Romantic sensibility is the art of the disaster movie. That's just a detail of a larger work that will hopefully be finished in the next month! As for what I'm writing… who knows if it will ever be done.
The other painting I'm working on is right in my wheelhouse, a portrait based on a beloved movie. It's a wedding gift for a friend, so I'll keep it under wraps for now, but expect to see it soon!
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It's overhaul time!
This space has been dark for a few years, as the one or two people who check regularly may have noticed. I haven't had much time for art in the past few years, which in the deepest, hidden recesses of one's mind leads to the undesirable question, "are you really an artist at all?" I made a conscious decision recently to get back into it all. Life and location changes mean that I finally have the time, and four years of brain rattlings mean that I have a surfeit of wacky ideas just waiting to erupt into PURE GENIUS. Check back in the next few months for new and exciting stuff! |
Julia Cooper
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