Thomas joshua cooper biography of abraham

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American photographer. San Francisco, California , U. Early life and education [ edit ]. Inspiration [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. The Scottish Arts Council. Louis Museum of Art, St. M a z z e g a Italian, Log in Sign up.

Access complete market analysis. Unlock exclusive artist performance data. Art History. Book Reviews. South Africa, TJC : I think words and pictures are naturally in conflict each other. There are three art forms, generic art forms, that have taken hold on the cultural imagination of the British intelligentsia and general public. The first one, figurative painting, absolutely dominated by the greatest figurative painters of the era, like Bacon and Freud amongst others and then going back on some level to figurative sculptures like Moore, Henry Moore.

Then weirdly, comes documentary photography, which has an absolute hold on the imaginative condition of the people in this country. Thirdly, and not unexpectedly, conceptual art. A figure is a figure. Documentary photography of a thing is a thing. The word base generally of certainly early conceptual art at least was transferable in terms of understanding, based on language.

The point I am trying to make then is that the English language is so absolutely, deeply, formally embedded in the sort of cultural structure of the imagination that anything that moves towards abstraction or tries to make a contra distinction of what realism is, and therefore what is related to how a word makes sense, has real serious problems.

There is for instance, excepting Salman Rushdie who quite clearly is an Indian writer, no magical realist in the English writing tradition. That understanding of how to approach language magically is what the best of art can do and the best of artists. But three things, figuration, documentation and conceptualisation have taken hold in a way that, actually, there is no going back.

There are almost no great abstract painters in British history. Every single maker who is considered a decent artist photographically in this country, an artist at a high level, is a figure or portrait maker. There are people who have moved through the documentary genre into being considered artists and it just irritates me because to me, the best at something for instance, Martin Parr, does actually incline one to believe that there is artistry involved.

Forgive me for saying it, but for the most part the landscape tradition, which is really interestingly being rediscovered in the Portsmouth area, has taken no consideration of the British land artists, who actually reinvigorated the landscape and the realism of landscape in relation to language as well. TJC : Yes - they changed the game and yet in some ways poor old Andy, whom I admire greatly as an image maker by the way, is seen too often as an illustrator.

So I mean where does this leave art in relation to photography? It suggests there is a real big problem. Where does that leave the thinking process? It is a material process in the use of illustrating things for other purposes. I regret … I only have a few regrets, but I have a genuine regret that I never made a substantial body of colour work.

That was stupid, but I had other things to do. I would try to figure out how to use colour to start scaring painters. In other words, to copy pictures that are already out there, illustrations in my opinion. But it takes real time to figure out the voice or the score and, in my kind of interests, more time yet to become familiar enough with the tune to find a way to improvise with them.

The musical lesson for me is, of course, the implicit recognition that music is structure. There is a structure to the form that makes the sounds, but within that the great continuing discovery is in this thing tunes and how to find a way to play groups of tunes the same, anew, differently, over and over again without it actually becoming a copy of one or the other.

TP : Well that probably brings me onto another question, which I think you might have an opinion on. That title, the Curator hit it so hard. Inspirations on the other hand are either sort of the good luck of finding something wonderful and falling in love with it or just being overwhelmed, zonked. The reason I talk about making pictures is that I build them.

I have this saying to myself, locate the edges and the sitter will take care of itself. But those two things are key to how I go out to try and make something outdoors. His last works really intrigued me as it turns out. Then of course a couple of things that Minor White made. And that was interiority, how something often without a horizon, outdoors, could have the equivalent feeling of being inside in a room, in a place, but still being outside.

There are varieties of ways of doing that. The first was to absolutely demand the removal of the horizon from the outdoor and that removed a figure-ground relationship , the triangulation of where your feet to a place to go to and then the opportunity to go. Generally speaking horizons move you out of the picture faster than you can be in it.

I use them very specifically now for very particular things and enjoy them enormously, but for a long time I refused them. Then my original interest, although of course Christ you know, like everybody else, I first fell in love with people like Eugene Smith and Cartier-Bresson, documentary photographers, both of whom … although Henri lived too long … lots of old people, including myself, talk shit too much you know and you have to be really, deeply careful of that.

I may be doing that in this conversation. Even in their pictures I saw what it is when you go out to do something and you have a feeling for the doing of it that is different than the expectation of what the thing might initially just look like.

Thomas joshua cooper biography of abraham

And I was like everybody else, just killed by those guys and I studied the work by them and I initially made pictures of people for five years and then I became more and more interested in what was surrounding the people, rather than the people themselves. By the way I mention pictures and I should add that I distinguish a photograph from a picture, a photograph is anything that comes out of a camera, a picture is something you make.

I love lots of things, including lots of photographs, but I only want to make pictures. I was a real working kid, a lumberjack, a lumber mill worker. Anyway, photography in the school I went to was listed as one of the drawing classes, I thought fantastic, any dumbo can take photographs, even me. I borrowed a camera, the first project, go out, isolate and discover visual form.

I had no idea what the guy was talking about. The Isle of Ytra Sula. Norway, Very near the West-most point of Norway. His disgust with what I had done was so immense … I mean I burst into tears because I knew I was screwed. It had taken me six years by then. But at some point I literally bumped into a painter who changed my life, named Maurice Graves who did a group of paintings, of which several now are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called Blind Bird.

He made paintings of animals in a kind of an inner space but he developed a painting style called white writing with a guy named Mark Toby, more prominent. I thought god, I really get it… without knowing why, why these white graphic marks in deep interiorised space of say a sense of bird flight or of settling wings or scrambling animals, makes sense and I realised that I could find that same kind of marking in branches, in the movements of water.

From then, very quickly I understood this drawing exercise. I just have to find something to interiorise and draw. But the problem of drawing, finding the edges and letting this improvised centre take care of itself, became instant; why? I have no idea. But it was a real picture, a broken tree on a creek bed that had weathered to silver. Leafless of course, bold, dead, silver, falling inward and pointing towards a dilapidated, disused cabin with five windows.

He and I were friendly and we ended up in the late seventies on the same lecture trail and he would go first because he was the famous one and I was the mutt so I would go last. But nearly every single one They are meditative, almost philosophical images, exquisitely printed by the artist in the 19th century manner with layers of silver and gold chloride.

Over 32 years Cooper voyaged to the cardinal points of the continents fringing the Atlantic Basin, charting from pole to pole, and making photographs out to horizonless seas and over apparently limitless landscapes. A selection of works from the Cooper's series, Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, was presented in an exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland from August January Visit: Thomas Joshua Cooper online viewing room, Read: The Wall Street Journal,