Julia Cooper

It'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.

I 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. 

I 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.

Two 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.

Tonight'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.

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!

You 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!

I finished a new painting! Sold it, too, which was an exciting first. I'm very pleased with how Data turned out. I'm especially happy about the experience of painting Spot. I haven't tried to paint an animal in some time, and it was fun to attack his face with no clue as to where to start. By the end, I felt like I had lost control. All I know is, I didn't intend for him to look like the demon's spawn, and he kind of does! I don't know how that spirit got in there, but I love it! It made me want to stretch my boundaries more, at the same time as the whole experience made me want to paint more portraits. I'm comfortable with that format, I feel fairly competent, and I enjoy all the baggage that comes along with a portrait - the question of, who is this person, really? Why were they chosen to be immortalized? The idea that a portrait will live on long after its subject is gone, a record forever, fascinates me.

I've also become re-interested in an idea I had a while ago, of painting dialogue from movies I love. I really like this idea because in the most blatant sense, it's one of the things I'm trying to convey with a lot of my paintings - that what can be seen to many as junk can also be viewed as art. And then again - is a canvas with words painted on it art? Oh, so many Benningtony levels of MEANING! I also like the possible relationship to illuminated manuscripts. Hence, I have spent the last two and a half hours watching scenes from movies I love, pausing every few seconds to transcribe the dialogue. (I don't trust IMDb's memorable quotes section OR what screenplays I can find online; I want the genuine article, right out of the actors' mouths!) As a result I have sixteen pages of my little notebook filled and a painful blister on my ring finger from the pen. Oh, the lost art of handwriting! I read an article a few days ago that suggested that cursive may be vanishing from this earth. As an honorable Montessorian, I shuddered - I learned cursive before print, from those wonderful sandpaper letters. ANYWAY, I've now got scenes from Point Break, Damien: Omen II, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven. An even split between schlock and brilliance. One thing I'm always amazed by is how many words are in even the shortest of conversations. It makes me want to be even more taciturn.

It's no secret to those who know me that I love Patrick Swayze. Or, to put it more precisely, Bodhi. Sure, I'm a girl, so of course I've seen Dirty Dancing a million times, and when I was fifteen I went through a phase where I thought I was S.E. Hinton, so I love The Outsiders and was peeved when one obituary referred to Swayze as Dally instead of Darry. But Point Break was truly the greatest Swayze movie of all. His most powerful onscreen pairing was not with Jennifer Grey or Demi Moore, but with the handsome dullard Keanu Reeves. They were perfect foils, "fire and wood" if you will. They made the tired cliche come alive. You may laugh (many do) but I find that however silly the story may be (delightfully so) the relationship between Bodhi and Johnny Utah feels real and heartwrenching. Swayze spoke every line in that movie like a prophet letting wisdom tumble from his lips. Even "Back off, Warchild. Seriously." I think of his words every time I find myself creeping along the freeway in my metal coffin. The final goodbye absolutely kills me. I rank the last ten minutes or so of Point Break up there with The Searchers and Notorious as Perfect Endings.
I never met Patrick Swayze. I don't feel too sad about his death, maybe because it wasn't much of a surprise. But I have been thinking of him a lot since his death. Mostly I'm just very, very grateful to him for playing such a big part in such a fantastic movie. Like Bodhi, Swayze will live on forever after death.