Barbara Cooper

The work of San Rafael artist Barbara Cooper evokes a consciously naive, childlike realm of bright, highly saturated colors depicting humans, demons, and magical creatures, both benevolent and malevolent, in flattened, seemingly decorative spaces. On closer examination, these backgrounds serve to provoke an emotional response in the viewer, often one that disturbs or agitates.

Prior to Cooper's current style, she worked for twenty-five years with Prisma pencils in an exacting, technically dazzling Photorealism. A typical piece took three to six months to complete.In 1993, after a debilitating neck surgery, she was unable to continue drawing without great pain and began to experiment with acrylics.Inspired by the immediacy of folk art and outsider art, Cooper found a sense of freedom in this new medium. Paintings could now be accomplished in two to five days. Her style absorbed the bright colors and cartoon imagery of Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Ronnie Cutrone. Along with these influences, Cooper's work acquired a new accessibility for her audience, something that was impossible with the seamless, alienating spaces of Photorealism.

Born in Ajo, Arizona, Cooper became a resident of the Bay Area in 1968. She studied art at San Francisco City College and transferred to the California College of Arts and Crafts where she studied under Jack Mendenhall, Ralph Borge, and Mary Snowden. Under the instruction of Mendenhall, Cooper obtained the technical precision and subtle command of light and shadow demanded in Photorealism. From Borge, she learned life drawing, and from Snowdon, Cooper gained a knowledge of watercolor technique. But it was Sydney Carson, a literature teacher at CCAC who has remained a lasting influence on the artist. In a children's literature class taught by Carson, Cooper read Ursula K. LeGuin's trilogy The Wizard of Earthsea. As Cooper explains, The wizards had to spend one year on an island learning the true names of things. [The main idea] is the power that's in the name of something, and you begin to look at the power that is in words that we use. It helped me a lot in some of the funny titles that I come up with.

Cooper's titles are one of the most striking features of her work. Often ironic, politicized, or humorous in a macabre sort of way, a seemingly innocent scene can acquire an entirely different flavor after reading the title. A gaily colored depiction of a children's nursery, for example, becomes something else entirely when titled Something Was Wrong in the Children's Room. The playroom, upon closer inspection, is filled with toys of a slightly demonic quality: a sinister cat, a wild-eyed jack-in-the-box, a slithering snake, and a fearful duck with scars on its body.

Similarly, in Prozac Stocks Soar as Christmas Approaches, the bright childlike colors and simplified figures belie the scene of a horrifying pharmacist with a heart of gold, symbolizing profits for the pharmaceutical industry, dispensing giant blue Prozac pills to Christmas shoppers with glazed and desperate looks on their faces. Titles often come from dreams, autobiographical sources, political commentary, or daily observation, such as Very Slight Variations on our Procrustean Society. This piece depicts a line-up of businessmen with slight variations in their blue suits, expressions, and hair. Using the myth of Procrusteus, who kidnapped people and stretched or cut them to fit his exacting iron bed, Cooper makes a mordant commentary on conformity in our society. She states, There is this horrible striving in all of us to be unique, but at the same time to fit in.

For Cooper, painting in this new, visceral style is an effort to consciously unlearn her extreme technical training and gain the freedom and vitality of two of the artists she most admires, the poet/painter Kenneth Patchen and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Working in a loose, abbreviated style, both Patchen and Basquiat incorporated text with imagery often to great ironic effect. Like these artists, Cooper strives for a similar provocation of the viewer.

It is because of this emphasis on audience response that Cooper refers to her body of work as a Fine Art Rorschach. Since interpretation is always shifting depending on the viewer, Cooper envisions each work as a screen on to which her audience projects their own fantasies and fears.
Heidi Thimann