Postcard from the artist Jacob Cooley.
This is from his
Floodplain Series.This was an advertisement for a show Cooley had at the Allentown Gallery in Durham, NC in 1997.
I am staring at a rather large Jacob Cooley drawing on the wall behind my computer as I type this.
It's from earlier in his career, when he was doing a lot of spooky landscapes in charcoal and pastel.
These drawings often depict liminal moments--when a landscape is going over to darkness (my drawing) or coming out of it. I've seen some very lush wet Edenic green morning paintings by Cooley. I still prefer his evening paintings.
In both the morning and evening paintings, Cooley's landscapes seem able to maintain light in a rather uncanny fashion. Light lingers in patches or swaths that probably shouldn't be there. There's a deviant physics at work. It's not straightforward landscape painting. It's just a little bit
X-Files. Or at least the ones I like most by Cooley are.
The painting on this card, in my opinion, is walking a thin line between interesting attention to light and a frightening nod to commercial potential.
If you step back from the painting, it almost appears as though nature is being illuminated by the light of an old television--that light which used to make suburban windows glow blue at night.
The handling of the trees is a tad reminiscent of Burchfield.
Now something weird.
I don't know what that white shit is that got on this postcard. Maybe it got on in the postal process or maybe I had white-out on my fingers when I handled it.
I didn't realize until I scanned it that that was not in the original painting.
My eyesight isn't as great as I'd like it to be but I rarely get fooled so completely.
I thought both of those smudges were mystery shapes
In the Pines--the title of the work (1997).
I thought it was subtle surrealism...something ghostly had caught on the pines. Two pieces of white cloth that seemed to be levitating more than they were blowing.
It made me think of a Carra painting that uses a similar device.
I love
pittura metafisica. Even with its contrivances.
But no. That's not really there!
I remember being taught that Kandinsky was the one who said,
"Chance is the greatest artist."Just now I was shocked that such a great and memorable quote only brought up four citations in Google.
And apparently the phrase originated in the
La Comedie Humaine of Balzac, not with Kandinsky.
Maybe Kandinsky was influenced by the Balzac quote and popularized it later. Or maybe my professor had crossed wires in her very capable brain the morning of that lecture.
Because Kandinsky would say something like that.
Remember when he had his great epiphany with the painting turned upside-down?
When he began believing that the plane of the painting should escape the orientation to which it had been sentenced.
His near-mystical ideas about color were another factor in his move towards abstraction--and a visual sense that the painting's plane should be of equal interest in all directions and orientations.
In a sense, this idea corresponded to Apollinaire's idea of simultaneities. The poet wrote that he wanted to embody that quality in his poetic art with his calligrammes, the way his imagery worked, etc.
I just now looked up Jacob Cooley to see what his art looks like now. How time flies.
I found some paintings I admired, like this one from 2009.
See what I mean about the uncanny in his paintings?
I think he's often a great landscape artist.
I saw on his site that he's been collected by a number of large corporations. That must always feel like a mixed blessing for painters, I'm guessing? On the one hand, your work is probably going to fetch a great price and it will be seen.
But on the other hand I'm wondering if there is a stigma that attaches itself to that. Whether you don't want your resume not to be too heavy with the corporations. I would think you'd want museum collections to outweigh the corporate acquisitions.
But I'm speaking as an outsider. Maybe it's not such a rule of thumb. I'm guessing less successful artists (saleswise) would probably slaver over such patronage.
Anyway, the most important thing is you can see growth in him as a painter between then and now and his work is memorable.
So I'm happy for him, and for the tradition of American landscape painting.
Because the same gauntlet Pound threw down in poetry ("Make it new") is there in landscape painting as a challenge.
And I do feel Cooley's works are thoroughly contemporary, even as they hearken to large traditions (Hudson River School, for one).
It's hard to articulate how something like a landscape can be contemporary.
Because what he's painting is precisely those elements of the landscape that have not changed.
And yet there is a sense of what constitutes a "moment" that marks the painting "of our time."
It's like trying to untie the Gordian knot to articulate that though!
Something to do with the relative weight of various ideas, the relational constellations.
A lot of it probably has to do with the changing nature of our technology and its optics.
The sense of optical resolution that we want.
How a computer screen makes images glow from within.
And how he can quote that but make it seem impoverished by comparison with his paintings at the same time.
Something in that direction...
