Jessica Cooper RWA
New Perspectives
2010, 76 x 81 cm
Acrylic on canvas
A surfer as well as an artist, Jessica Cooper knows what it is like to sit on the skin of the ocean still as a bird while all around seems to boil. The very tip of west Cornwall, that must have seemed like the world’s end to the Ancients, plunges dramatically into a sea stirred overnight from glassy calm into a white-tipped frenzy, the weather rushing in to dip and kiss its blessings and curses, and move off hurriedly. Jessica’s new exhibition of landscapes and still lifes captures the calm geometry at the centre of these elaborate weather changes. Paint is sometimes left to drip from the canvas, leaving traces that are tethers, tracks for the eye to follow upward, to finally rest on a deceptively solid house, a symbol of shelter not just at the heart of the storm but also at the heart of the calm.
The short drive from St Just to Sennen is a regular journey for Jessica – what the Greeks called katabasis, the journey from interior to coast, from shelter to adventure. She leaves behind the whispering remains of tin mines to embrace a coastscape bathed in reflected light from the sea. Her painting An Interrupted Silence is full of this luminous white light. Just the burrs of burdock can be made out, as if to shout, ‘I am alive’. It is what you cannot see and hear that is revealing in such minimal work – the surplus, such as riotous beds of gorse, restless sand dunes, inventive skylark harmonies, a pounding shorebreak pulled up and pulled back to the twin tidelines by the distant moon, like a bedsheet cast off and then recovered. By omitting this surplus, yet hinting at it slyly, Jessica’s paintings sing. The tidal layers are repeated as white acrylic on canvas. The white is not languid phrasing but intensely beautiful moving space. Making such a space sing, with eloquent phrasing, is again the secret to Jessica’s latest paintings, working at the animal edge of silence.
Track To The Beach reveals a density of silence, a deep anticipation, in one of the pathways that lead to the edge of Gwenver beach. Nothing But Blue Lines is like an aching silence bouncing off a calm sea punctuated by a perfectly timed cluster of blue lines. After the set of waves passes, a big space opens up, and there is, again, a familiar noiseless calm. As Jessica says, “The point is to spend a little bit more time looking and listening. People don’t seem to do that enough. I try to notice. I have these things I look for on the beach, like cowry shells. And I’ve noticed how they only come with certain tides, and cluster after certain winds.” For Jessica, reality should be experienced as it presents its face, neither prettified nor avoided. “I like to watch where the cormorants dive for fish,” she adds. “It always seems to be the spot where the wave energy is highest.” This hot spot where the familiar greets you is readily identifiable in any of Jessica’s paintings as the point of balance.
So, the point of a life is not to gain materially, but to capitalise on one’s senses in close noticing - an aesthetic adventure. A trip from St Just towards Sennen is “never a wasted journey.” Jessica’s sketchbook accompanies her whether surfing, walking, or just sitting in the van and gazing. A recurrent theme in her work describes visits to her close friend, Miki Ashton, from whose cottage you can stare beyond Whitesands Bay to strip back the horizon and reveal an imagined Nova Scotia coastscape. This house offers the template for the vibrant still lifes and interiors in the exhibition.
In Have I Told You Lately the green lilies seem to reach out from a patterned vase to unlatch a window. The tabletop slopes towards the sea in an effort to marry wood and water. Jessica’s ubiquitous fruit bowls reflect the changing moods of that sea, where light scooped up now bounces off the bowl as it would from the slack drumhead of a calm ocean. The sense of the familiar reveals the sea and its creatures as familiars. A cup and saucer drawn in the same room is entitled Sitting Deep, echoing surfer sitting on seaskin as saucer, ready to be tipped. This urgent sense of being at sea is most apparent in the recurrent image of houses, often central to the painting. They promise hospitality at the heart of a stark landscape. In previous collections, Jessica’s houses are grounded through a horizon line or a link to the canvas edge. My Heart Lies In It shows greater freedom and possibly a new terror: two houses with russet roofs float at sea in darkness, arks without immediate purpose.
Jessica’s new works reveal a rhythmic engagement with coastscape,
and capture the fluidity and surprise of surfing without resorting to
cliché: “There is a raw feeling of dread and exhilaration
when you surf,” says Jessica. “When it goes wrong it totally
jars. And there is an element of risk with a painting. If I leave a piece
to dry flat it might thicken a line too much. Or, if left upright the
drip might change the whole feel of the canvas.” Risk here is not
fear of drowning, or getting frostbite as you slip on your wetsuit in
sub-zero temperatures in Sennen car park. Rather, the risk - and its
attendant fear - is of fully inhabiting the pulse of places.
“The lines in the sea are the hardest to paint and read,” says
Jessica, and much of this exhibition is about “trying to follow that
fluidity”, interlinking it to a sense of place. The outcome is again
making space and movement out of a sense of place. In analysing these paintings,
it is easy to move away from their initial inspiration and final location in
the heart, in straightforward love of coastscape. Jessica has found a home
in this genre. “I have come to terms with a lot of things,” says
Jessica. “I am at home in a new house, at home in the sea, happy with
life as a professional artist. So I have been able to let go with my work because
I feel like I have nothing to prove.” Beauty does not need to be explained,
appreciation always comes before explanation.
Sam Bleakley
Travel writer and professional surfer
2010