Marilyn Cooper
littleriverwest@gmail.com
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To purchase works by member artists, link to the artists directly
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Crouching
Figure |
Studio
Bathroom |
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Delaware
Water Gap from the Post Office
Price on Request |
Delaware
Water Gap Looking South
Sold |
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Three
Sources of North Light in Basement
Price on Request |
Britta
on Couch Price on Request |
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Contact Marilyn at
marilyn@doubt.com
for commissions
Portrait
of a Passionate Artist
Marilyn Cooper driven by surge of creative power
by Robert K Hays, Easton Express arts-entertainment editor
Interviewing Marilyn Cooper
is an experience. She's a whirlwind of opinions and ideas showering sparks every
which way like a diamond refracting light.
Each comment reveals another facet of this...artist, mother, teacher, backyard
philosopher and Kung-Fu instructor, who calls herself a "self-generating
mechanism."
For example:
Marilyn is a slender, engaging,
intense woman, with hazel eyes and a mane of dark brown hair. She was born ...in
Detroit, daughter of a "frustrated violinist" who managed women's
clothing stores and a mother who was a "political revolutionary in the
suburbs in the 50's...She belonged to an obscure splinter group of the Trotskyites."
Almost from the start, Cooper thought of herself as an artist. She remembers
as a 6-year-old writing in her diary, " I want to be an artist and live
in a tower."
She hasn't found her tower yet, but she has blossomed into a gifted artist able
to translate her restless energy into oil on canvas and charcoal or chalk on
paper....
The artist may be her own harshest critic. She's seldom satisfied. She's certainly
not over-welmed by what she sees on a May afternoon as she stands in a friend's
studio-barn outside Martins Creek (PA), scrutinizing an oil of the street where
she lives....
To her interviewer, Cooper's painting is a visual feast - the subject is charming,
the colors alice, the composition right. Trees, sidewalks, railway tracks, the
street and a crazy tilting telephone pole shooting off at angles, catching the
character of the hilly Slate Belt town.
But Cooper is not pleased. The trees on the left, dappling the ground in shadows,
are "too scientific, too labored and studied," she complains. These
are not qualities she esteems in her work.
"The feedback I get to my art is that it's soft, romantic, liquid, moving,
light," she says. "But my work is changing so fast that I feel like
I'm on a fast train and I'm just working it out,: she says.
Cooper wants to work in passionate burst of emotion. "I want the paint
to throw itself on before I get there," she explains.
She talks of designing a palette that would rest waist-high, hanging on suspenders
from her shoulders. That way, she could wield a brush in each hand, applying
paint in a rapid, drummer-like fashion.
"My commitment is to go with all the flashes that come," she says,
"to keep the paint moving - not to create the first image, but to go with
the glasses....I really like to move thick paint around like frosting."
Later, she adds, "Something I think about is: How did it look the first
time, we opened our eyes, after birth? Colors were probably very intense. out
heads didn't turn yet; (our) gaze must have wandered as shapes and colors pulled
it. I want to see the paint like that!"
Cooper has arranged her work in the studio-barn of a friend, noted photographer
Larry Fink, so she can better display it for someone considering whether to
exhibit her art at a New York gallery. The gallery show would be a tremendous
career boost for Cooper, who's divorced and has three (now four) children, Anuta...Daria...Webb...and
Soshia.
Cooper....helps support the household by operating the Little River kung-Fu
School....http://www.actionsite.com/littleriver
Cooper has been in the martial arts for (31) years, and has trained under "authentic
Chinese Kung-Fu masters" in San Francisco, she says. She's reached an advanced
level in Kung Fu, a discipline which provides a release for her physical energy.
( In 1997 Cooper won 1st place in adv. Tai Chi at the Kung Fu, Wu Shu World
Championships in Orlando, FL.)....
Cooper believes that she can make a name for herself as an artist. Although
she regards her drawings as her best work, she's been advised to sell paintings
if she's to be taken seriously in the art world.
Room interiors are a primary focus of her charcoal sketches, which she executes
"fast and furious since I'm just working with light and dark, although
I can infer space....
"I like to include my whole frame of vision, not just individual objects
like a table or the bottle on it. I draw everything that my eye takes in - I
don't simplify it according to some sort of aesthetic sensibility."
Landscapes and interior spaces are the focus of her paintings, which she notes,
seem to be considered impressionistic by everyone except herself. she describes
her style as "infantile and gestalt....I like it when edges disappear,
when everything blends in."
Cooper approaches her subjects from unusual angles, creating a sense of vertigo:
cars cling to inclines, windows lean outward, mirrors contract inward, and wooded
alleys curve downward, almost spilling forward like a wave.
A striking example of this leaning sensation is found in an oil titled "Cerulean
Bathroom,: a view of her bathroom, which she painted with her right shoulder
to her subject. The painting also demonstrates her light palette. The walls
and bathwater are sky blue and the tile floor is a striking pattern of diamond-shaped
pinks, purples and yellow-greens
Cooper likes painting scenes of rooms "full of junk and unpredictable objects
crowding in to view." She points to "Myra's Studio," done in
a friend's easel-filled art studio. The floor on the left is loosely defined,
and could as easily be long grass. In contrast an arrangement of oranges in
the center of the studio is tightly painted - clearly oranges. the painting
illustrates Cooper's interest : in the total view, how it falls apart and comes
together."
She has definite ideas about what she wants to achieve in her art. " I
Don't want to make maps of reality." she stresses. " I want to get
lost. I want my paintings to be a nest of colors that you can dive into."
Each painting, she says, is a window on her next one. "There's some section
of activity in it that suggests where I'm going next."....
"I've been sitting in the dirt while I paint, looking up," she says.
"Dirt blows into the paint, bugs stick to the canvas. (But) paint's just
colored dirt anyway....
" I guess I need nature to paint from - a studio with no daylight would
be the end of me."
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