John Cooper: Painter of Toad Rock (and Mt. Loki)

John Cooper’s spontaneous art, a fixture of the Kootenay Lake region of British Columbia for the past forty years, is an individual compendium of 20^th-century art movements.

John Cooper at his home in Queens Bay Townsite, Kootenay Lake, BC, Canada (19th September, 2008)

Stories about John Cooper are as abundant and provocative as his paintings. Like Toad Rock or Mount Loki—the monumental landscape icons he likes to paint around Queen’s Bay, the tiny benchland community just past Balfour on Kootenay Lake where he lives—certain themes reoccur, steady as a pulse. These are rooted in Expressionism, Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, all the early modern art movements, which are also the themes of his life.

Self-Portrait, John Cooper Retrospective: Old Nelson.

Firstly, there are the fundamental physical aspects:

Much is made of the cheerful chaos that is his home—assembled from scratch and salvage, particularly of wood and windows. Ian Johnston, curator of the Touchstones Museum exhibition of John Cooper’s life work, describes it thusly:

“I had been to Cooper’s house some years ago, but had forgotten about the dissonance of art and objects that comprise his world. The house is as much an art-piece and world, as is his (and Kathleen’s [Kathleen Pemberton, John Cooper’s wife ]) work. In fact Cooper’s images may often be considered a cacophony, filled with an eclecticism of information which draws the viewer’s eye around the canvas.”

Ian Johnston, guest curator: Retrospective: golden years,
Touchstones Museum; Nelson, BC; August 2^nd – September 28^th, 2008.

John Cooper's Living Room (with Portrait)

Necessity made short shrift of any sentimental attachment to form; the place had to go up one summer in order to shelter his children before the winter hit. The first roof was nothing more than plastic over plywood.

“Snow would slide right off it,” explains Cooper. “It kept us dry. My only regret was there was no money to pour a proper foundation.”

Even so, decisive designs light up in the angle of the staircase offset to the living room, for example, or the bank of windows facing east toward the lake.

Staircase in John's Home with miniature gallery

These choices were organic—born out of the man’s interaction with his natural environment in a manner which would have delighted Frank Lloyd Wright—but also as intelligently chosen as any trained and skilled architect dealt the same hand of cards. There was a time when Cooper’s work was exhibited at the Whitney, Chicago Institute and Denver Center, and his earliest work plays with the pattern and repetition of manmade forms.

Tract housing in Chicago, 1965, kodachrome. John Cooper

Those early paintings evoke the housing tracts of Chicago, immortalized in a kodachrome photo he took in 1965, which graces his catalogue. Rows of identical houses in all their squared, mechanical geometry, with every curve, every asymmetrical element drill-pressed out of them, entirely artificial and soldierly, yet unable to best the natural curve of the larger landscape when viewed from afar, conquered by the sweeping lines of nature which overwhelms all by sheer scale. In these pictures, Cooper recalls Cézanne and how the world is broken up into cones, spheres, pyramids and, according to the artist, least naturally of all, cubes. Even the most unnatural feat of engineering concedes to nature because nature is larger than it, as large as the universe. Cooper’s house is the clearest enactment of this principle.

Truck, candlestick and gun. Acrylic on board.

So it is with Cooper’s artwork. Many of his pieces include found elements. Either they are rendered as paintings of set designs—as with his “Chicken Series” of paintings, which includes images of toy trucks and Mexican pottery—similar to the process by which Canadian Superrealist, John Hall, would paint staged assemblages of props.

fish -- Fishtruck --- fish, mixed media, 29" x 7" x 13", John Cooper

Or, they are put directly into the painting, like the water faucet in “fish–Fish Truck–fish,” in the manner which Julian Schnabel placed shattered crockery into his massive Neo-Expressionist canvasses—not because there was a specific reason why they had to be there, but because the forms enthralled him and he responded intuitively. Just as Schnabel’s work contains real layers, and pokes jests like a Dadaist at the inference of deeper subconscious meaning, Cooper’s work plays with similar flotsam, the same collective cache of stuff.

That’s where the similarity stops, however. Cooper is not engaged with photorealism, and he isn’t wholly given over to expressionism on such a monumental scale—unless you include his home. Cooper is someone who came of age in the America of the 1960s. His art wasn’t defined so much by his contemporaries, as it moved alongside and with them.

Original Walter Williams by John Cooper

There’s Magritte in his piece, Walter Williams, a faceless styrofoam hat or wig holder with an extravagant handlebar moustache drawn where a moustache might go. There’s Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in his iconic arrangements of toy trucks and bears painted against eerie landscapes. The objects are taken from real things, but the landscapes are pure fantasy.

Four Views of Walter Williams: (top left) Intermittently Envious; (top right) Stop Clearcuts

“I started teaching at the University of Indiana in 1965-1966. I was into producing this raw art, immediate stuff, working with pure consciousness, and I came to this place where the main style which was being taught was sort of classical–” he hems at the choice of word, “very formal, very traditional, very rigid. And do you know what? Nobody was having any fun. So the fellow who hired me, he winked at me, and said, “Can you lighten it up here a little?”

John starts to laugh. “I did that, alright. I did that. I lasted for five years.”

The laughter dies when he describes what happened, “It is always the same problem when the aspirations of an institution are set by academics who have sold out. The school falls into the hands of people who are only there to make money. They would take me aside and say, “Look, John, we’ve got this good little thing going here. Why rock the boat?”

““Rock the boat?” I would cry out. “Let’s shake this damned thing. Let’s sink the S.O.B.!”

“After five years, they fired me—some lame excuse or another. It was fine. My work was done there. It was time to leave.”

So Cooper packed up and moved to Canada.

Title Unknown, acrylic on board

“Why Canada? Clean air. Clean water. Lots of open space. First I moved to Winnipeg, and was working at the University of Manitoba. Then I came out here to the Kootenays, and this fellow offered me a place to live, an old old-building on his farm in the Slocan Valley. I split shakes, picked fruit, planted trees. I did whatever needed to be done in order to survive.”

Cooper’s move to Canada entailed the second fundamental physical aspect that informed his art: the hardscrabble necessity of earning a living against the harsh elemental reality of winter in the West Kootenays.

Snow, acrylic on canvas.

“I fixed cars. I was a mechanic for many years until it became clear that wasn’t what I was supposed to do.”

Pemberton cuts in, “John was a good mechanic! He understands how cars work. That wasn’t why he quit.”

“Naw, it wasn’t where my heart was.”

Apple Tree, acrylic on board.

“For awhile, I sold Jack and Marion Starr’s apple juice. He would collect apples off all these derelict Heritage orchards around here and Balfour, and press the cider from them. I sold them door-to-door in Kaslo. And then, I hooked up with Greg Lund, the Tofu King. He started that business with two blenders and two hot plates, 16 – 18 years ago. Sold it to Jeff Bock, who runs Silver King Soya Products.”

John Cooper and Kathleen Pemberton met while picking fruit during the harvest seasons.

“There were about thirty families who worked the different farms.” Kathleen describes how she met John. “We would travel from one place to another, finish our job and part ways. Then, meet back up with each other at a different spot. So John and I ran into each other fairly often, and our connection built up from there.”

During this period, Cooper’s art seems to have undergone a radical shift. First of all, most of his early pieces were destroyed in a fire, but images remain in the form of photos.

House progression installation 7 panels of 10, 1966, acrylic on canvas, dimensions variable, Photo: John Cooper

House progression installation 7 panels of 10, 1966, acrylic on canvas, and Modular progressions + first 2 house progressions, 1966, acrylic on canvas, dimensions variable, are two such images, both strongly informed by Frank Stella and, prior to the minimalism of Stella, Cézanne: geometrical, interlocking playing on the iconic form of a house, ⌂, with sharp edges and primary colours or grey and white.

Modular progressions + first 2 house progressions, 1966, acrylic on canvas, dimensions variable, Photo: John Cooper

There is a strong Scandinavian sensibility which evolved in step with the functional design of the period. A photo of sculptures, called Beautiful hopper show, 1967, arranged across the lawn at the university where he taught in Terre Haute, Indiana, shows the same shapes in 3-dimensional form: cubes topped by pyramids, man’s urban repetition and form imposed over nature.

Abruptly, as though sliced off, in 1970 and coinciding with his move to Canada, Cooper’s art stopped being modular, minimalist, hard-edged geometry with matte monochromatic surfaces, and the most attenuated connection to representation in his abstracted images where ⌂=house.

Instead, as though to disavow the statement that “painting is dead,” figurative representation springs out from his canvasses: faces, trees, flowers, mountains. Lines and shapes became fluid, sinuous, and irregular, like those found in nature. In his play with them, Cooper shifts from Picasso to Matisse and back again. The hard-edged symmetry and interlocking geometry dissolved into freestyle rendering of shapes, imprecise, imperfect, but vital and energizing. Static forms—which required that the viewer move from one panel to the next in order to generate movement—shifted to visual dances of colour, temperature and values. Patterns, repetition and monotony disappeared as though Cooper painted things as they flew at him, into his field of vision, into his awareness.

Ambulance Truck, acrylic on canvas.

Even the mechanical objects in his paintings possess something which borders on individualized ego. Trucks are fashioned out of fish, long before Japanese animator, Hiyao Miyazaki, fashioned a bus out of a cat for My Neighbour Totoro, but maybe about the time Peter Maxx sprouted flowers from the bell of a tuba in Yellow Submarine. Wig stands sprout whiskers. Tractors moved on saurian hind legs replete with monstrous claws. Each canvas or assemblage erupted with colour and dynamic visual movement, with swirls of paint and thick impasto.

Not all this was plucked completely out of the left field or “right side of the brain” as Cooper might say, in reference to the landmark book on drawing by Betty Edwards. Strange things do happen in the Kootenays. Silk neckties appear, fully knotted and hanging straight out of the blue, on telephone poles for miles, until, finally, the telephone company decides the fun has lasted long enough and, instead of merely pulling down the neckties, replaces the entire legion of poles. The same telephone company then prohibited anyone from colouring or putting up a piece of art on another one again.

Toad Rock, Mt. Loki + Telephone Poles with neckties. Acrylic on board

“What I found about the Kootenays is that it was a cultural success,” Cooper states. “There were natives, hippies, and enough of the new and unusual that the community was stimulating and inspiring. It could also scare the shit out of you. I had two kids to support and a wife [not Kathleen] who, for whatever reason at that time, felt she had to be on her own.”

Bob Dylan, Sears lawn tractor, Rembrandt, Bobe Hope and Richard Nixon playing golf, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 36". Photo: John Cooper

There is a painting of Cooper’s titled Bob Dylan, Sears lawn tractor, Rembrandt, Bob Hope and Richard Nixon playing golf, 1970, acrylic on canvas. Rembrandt’s disembodied head floats above a landscape like a god, against a sky striped with acrylic red and yellow washes, dripping down the primed canvas. Bob Dylan’s grossly enlarged, cartoon head and caricatured face perched on a doll’s body drives the reptile-legged tractor over an acidic green field, leaving blue waves touched with yellow like the reflection of sunlight, in his wake. A line of primary colours streaks across the green field—a red, white and blue border. Bob Hope and Richard Nixon stand beyond it, only in the form of two geometric house shapes on the distant landscape, squared off and manmade, casting little shadows. Flowers and trees, not even remotely scaled to perspective, rise from the foreground—in this case the lower edge of the painting.  The presence of hoppers is signified not by pyramids and cubes, but by the stencilled word, “HOPPER” like credits burned on the television series, “MASH.” Order has disintegrated, but it is less chaotic and eclectic than one might assume. It is as though, betrayed by modernism, Cooper has decided to bust free, to break it down.

This is political satire and discourse as John Cooper renders it: a cheeky, cheerful irreverence—anger at the forces which have, in his words, “trashed the world so bad that you’ve got to go somewhere else to find any beauty” but not incandescent rage. This isn’t someone on the verge of horrifying acts of violence, like a Bader-Meinhof gang member.

“Oh, we are all part of this, me as much as the next guy. I drive around. I consume fossil fuels. I use a lawn mower and a chainsaw. Sure, there are times when I get fairly disgusted about all of this and want it to be the other guy. Sure, the excesses offend me, but I’m a party to it.

“It hurts my heart.

Heart of my Hearts. Acrylic on Board

“The question is how to engage, especially if the water goes. Then we’re in an enigma mode.”

He clarifies, “An enigma is an unsolvable riddle, the unsolvable mystery of our own ability to survive. This is where damage grows exponentially, where another 400 barriers are thrown up for every one we solve, channelling us faster and faster toward our own extinction. We’re consuming the life-sustaining capabilities of human beings to endure, and we’re wising up too late.

Cottonwood Falls in Nelson, acrylic on board.

“Well, there are all kinds of undelivered responsibility for it. I’m part of it. If you want to think about karma, you have to understand, like Darwin said, that we’ve built our demise into our existence unless we evolve. The only way I can evolve is use my self-judgment and a lot of ingenuity and self-sacrifice. I try to turn it all into good energy. I try not to take more out of this beautiful planet of ours than I put back in.”

This, in giving as well as receiving, is where John Cooper becomes the art teacher—an irrepressible, spontaneous outpouring of delight in the components of art. He launches into a fullscale colour theory lecture at his own artist’s talk at the Touchstones Gallery, holding colour card after colour card against the neutral white wall, counting out the seconds, and garnering responses from the audience as to the physiological effects. He produces colour wheel after colour wheel, then describes the surface of Seurat’s La Grand Jatte and how the intricate placement and interplay of complementary and simultaneous contrasts made the painting seem more alive than any scene in nature.

Cooper credits Professor Spencer A. Moseley, his graduate advisor at the University of Washington—“a huge intelligence and servant of the muse; his heart fully given to the muse”—with taking him on the grand tour of modernism that led to Cooper’s birth as “an emotional colourist.”

“All colours are more or less the same. There is no actual physical reality of colour. It’s all perception. My red will never be the same as your red. It is the relationships of colour, in all their intense tones and shades, that determine the hue, the value, the intensity and temperature. It is by understanding and manipulating these elements, both intuitively and intellectually. The intellectual process is used to explore and expose wherever it wishes to go.”

Sunset Beach in Costa Rica, acrylic on board.

So colours in John Cooper’s paintings shift from physical awareness to a psychological-spiritual response. In this manner, the painting subject is a transcendental process—an energy which is greater than Cooper, something which he channels through the process of creation. Yes, education and experience bear weight, but there is also an emotional release and expressive, gestural brushwork. In this manner, Cooper is probably closer akin to the Fauves and German Expressionism—early Kandinsky or Kirchner, although without Kirchner’s bitterness, and again, Matisse, in portraiture and landscape.

Self-portrait with orange nose. 2005, acrylic on board. 14" x 14".

Spontaneous colour theory lectures aside, John Cooper has kept up with his teaching practice, both through the Kootenay School of Art and with Red Deer College. He and Pemberton also travel to northern Saskatchewan to participate in the Emma Lake Workshops—a place in which collective groups of about a hundred professional artists collaborate to make art.

“This style of art forces you to give away your exclusivity and control. The art you make becomes a contribution into a pool of creativity, ever renewing. This cycle makes us high.

“When I moved to the backwoods of BC, I gave up my financial stability, my expertise, recognition—everything. I was sure there had to be some way to live that was respectable, where I was giving as well as taking. I had to keep my work and passion in a sane place. When you live always taking, it puts a load on your heart. Maybe, if you pay attention to that burden, that makes you look into yourself. That’s when you try to be.”

Mountain in Nelson

He amends his choice of words.

“Naw, that’s when you just be. Trying gives you a way out. You have to renew yourself everytime you approach your work of art. You have to keep your passion in it, your spontaneity and fun. Without passion you die. It’s a state of inner being.

“I know what I think and what I live for. I don’t always know how to do it. I have become the true art. The byproducts are those things that come in little frames—and vice versa. I am my art and art made me.”

A commonplace household item like a whisk broom is bronzed and centered on a plaque, where it becomes an icon and celebrates the sacredness of the ordinary. Toad Rock and Mount Loki are painted over and over again, the way a monk repeats a chant or a prayer, so that sheer repetition induces a sensation of accumulation and pattern. The landmarks become props in the design of a set, objectified by the repetition, but not mass-produced as with factory-created items. They are enlivened by different brushstrokes and the sheer intensity of colour, and this pushes each work back into super-sensory, heightened experience, like a moment of Zen.

Kathleen Pemberton

Kathleen Pemberton is a substantive partner in this process. An accomplished professional artist who rightly deserves acknowledgment of her talents and abilities on their own merits, Pemberton also teaches at Red Deer College and travels around western Canada to paint. She lived for 30 years on Cortez Island in the Straits of Georgia, her creativity and artistic expression coming through as a fabric artist.

The garden is mainly the result of Kathleen Pemberton's work.

“I had children and my own garden, and felt that I had to justify my creativity by placing it in a functional framework. So I dyed, spun and wove wool. I sewed original clothing and other fabric pieces. This is a dilemma which many mothers face: I couldn’t justify being an artist for the sake of art. It had to be useful. So I’ve only actually painted for the past 13 years.”

Kathleen and the family pet.

She props up her latest painting, a view of the ocean as glimpsed from a sea lion’s cavern was freshly on the shore of Vancouver Island. She also paints with bold brushstrokes laden with unorthodox colours. The colours seem to ebb and flow with the movement of wind and water, rippling and reflecting light, but in an abstracted manner. It is the type of painting which puts a person into a meditative state, full of strength, stability and calm.

Two strings of Tibettan prayer flags hang like garlands over the door to their house. Pemberton’s garden, a riot of fresh vegetables and flowers stretches toward the road.

“I started painting Toad Rock because it was right where I would set up to paint Mount Loki.” John tells his audience at the Touchstones Gallery exhibition. “And I started to paint Mount Loki because it looked like a hopper. It was a natural embodiment of Cézanne a pyramid stacked on top of a cube.”

Toad Rock, Mount Loki and Single Telephone Pole with a Necktie, acrylic on board.

Anyway, there was this rock, and I started to really like the shape of it. Well, there were other elements which worked rather well there, too—the bend in the highway and the telephone poles with their neckties knotted on them—but if you think the painting was about representing reality, think again. In one painting, the road bends one way. In another, it’s going the completely opposite direction. One painting has a single telephone pole and necktie, the next has three. Oh, and look!—In that one there’s a whole string of them.”

Toad Rock, Mt. Loki + four neckties & highway sign. Acrylic on board

“But there’s always Mt. Loki and Toad Rock. Those are the consistent elements which I repeat.”

An entire wall of the gallery is covered with nothing but different versions of John’s renderings of Toad Rock. One painting is almost completely abstracted: a series of concentric squares like a quilt, in the centre of which the toad’s eye stands out like the hieroglyphic eye of an Egyptian wall mural. In another, the black paint is applied in a Japanese brushwork style against a wooden background. Most of them are expressionistic, however, and the sheer scale of so many colourful paintings, each uniquely rendered, has the effect of building up an irrepressible joy.

Wall of John Cooper's Toad Rock Paintings at Touchstones Museum (August -- September 2008)

“Consider the chant, Om Mani Padme Hum, which is one that I’m constantly chanting to myself over and over again while I paint,” Cooper explains at his talk. “It has been chanted by spiritual people since the dawn of time. With something like that, the constant repetition builds up the sacredness. Now this chant has permeated our world so that it is always there for us to draw upon. All you have to do is chant it, and it’s right there, ready for you.”

In this fashion, Cooper has caught the ephemeral moments of a time and place: the Kootenay region of central British Columbia from the 1970s to the first decade of the 21^st Century, something which, like the neckties on those telephone poles, is changing beyond all recognition, even disappearing.

Interview: Friday, 19^th September, 2008 at his home in Queen’s Bay on Kootenay Lake, BC, Canada.

Artists Talk at Touchstones Museum in Nelson, BC, 7:30 – 10 pm, Thursday, 25^th September, 2008

John Cooper: Retrospective: golden years, exhibition guest curated by Ian Johnston, 2^nd August to 28^th September, 2008 at Touchstones Museum, Nelson, BC, Canada.