Jessica Cooper - Biography

Sometimes it takes just the one line, cutting into a space, to bring reality and the experience together.

I work in acrylic and pencil on canvas, building up shape and colour by the application of layer upon layer of paint.  I strive to achieve perfect balance in my paintings and am interested in reaching this through precision of composition, so that the perfect, almost geometric placing of an image on the canvas, is of the utmost importance.  I hope to achieve an uncluttered simplicity which leaves much for the audience to read between the lines.  Through this deceptive simplicity of mark, colour and composition I hope to shift the viewer’s perceptions of everyday objects and experiences and to encourage them to find the one thing which is significant to them.

I make paintings about particular memories and experiences which I record in sketch-books.  I try to isolate images in their painted world so that they stand as signifiers, like short poems, to convey those overwhelming moments of understanding and feeling that life can occasionally dish up.  I edit out the extraneous so that the images stand alone, becoming metaphors for time and place and our emotional continuity.

People are regularly intrigued by my titles which, although they relate intimately to each piece of work, are never an attempt to analyse or explain but are an echo, I hope, of the subtexts of all our emotional lives.

Come Dance With Me

32" x 34"

£2500

Curiosity

22" x 22 "

£1600