Jessica Cooper

As one of Cornwall’s leading contemporary painters, Jessica Cooper has lived and worked in the isolation of West Penwith’s spare and weather worn landscape for most of her life. Having studied at Falmouth College and Goldsmith’s London, Cooper exhibits on a regular national basis, including exhibitions at The Exchange and Newlyn Art Galleries and Tate St. Ives: she is an RWA (Royal West of England Academician) and a member of the NSA (Newlyn Society of Artists). Cooper’s work is held in numerous private and public collections worldwide.

‘Her work is loaded with artistic integrity and an appreciation of simply being: her paintings conveying those overwhelming moments of understanding and feeling that life can occasionally dish up. In her subtle hands, less thus really does become very much more, the objects a quietly poetic metaphor for human existence.’

Elizabeth Knowles OBE

Jessica Cooper’s paintings have a clarity of observation and mark making that create their own ambiguity. Forming connections, emotions evolving and revolving, the paintings are caught in time, place and circumstance. Her subjects are the familiar that anchor her in her life; isolated on canvas, we reappraise and interpret them through our own daily lives. We feel we know them, as indeed we do; they are part of the shared human experience. A sense of place, a sense of self, and a sense of the pathos of the house, the tree, the cup, flower or fruit, are the communicating elements of Jessica Cooper’s work; that these objects and landscapes cannot know the emotional response they trigger in us; the moment caught and held by the paintbrush and pencil; and underpinning and supporting, the emotional communication, a strongly intuitive but academic understanding of area, colour, form and tone. In many ways visual poetry of the sparest and most affecting kind.
Sarah Stoten