Karen Cooper, capturing people & their daily routines

Painting People’s Stories

Karen is a figurative painter, who spent her college years at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, sampling just about every department available, with textile and fashion design eventually seizing most of her attention. That course of study required a fair amount of drawing classes from the art department, and the introduction to life drawing was made.

Many years and many experiences later, the focus of my work is again with the figure, intrigued by the stories that can be told with paintings of people, their postures, and their relationships to each other.

My current work is a free-form play in usage of the phrase “visual communication”.

People say they enjoy people watching as a leisure activity.

I do it with intensity. And then I paint it.

My goal in my work is to awaken in viewers the ability to visually recognize the commonalities shared with people around them, so to encourage feeling part of a larger whole, to belong.

The current work is oil on canvas, a few are acrylic on canvas.

All are focused on people and their daily routines, and the thought-provoking images they make.

It’s the simple stuff that we all do, but when you attach it to a person, it communicates something of each one of us, to the other of us. And then there occurs that magic moment in which a story appears.

I like the quote attributed to Matisse:

“I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”

And what is a painting, if not for that magic moment that the artist wants, and needs, to share.
Karen Cooper
Sep 16, 2017

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