Annunciation
oil on birch panel, 14" x  14", 2023

STATEMENT

First of all, I’m as bewildered by my work as you are. But I steered toward that. 

I developed a method of semi-consciously drawing after accidentally discovering that the results were better. My office meeting doodles were quite mindless while my hand made them, and they were often more compelling than anything I drew with intent. So I cultivated that trance in the studio, silencing reason, focusing only on form.

It’s fair to say that my paintings are senseless, if sense is made of words. I think visual art, much like music, can offer us a shared respite from language. Paintings can go places words can’t.

Picasso may or may not have said: “The world makes no sense, so why should art?” I would just tweak that to: “The world makes nothing but sense, so why should art?”

Should you seek in my work any resemblances to the known visible world, you’ll find some, but I try to both invoke and scramble familiarity, much as our dreams do. 

I feel more like a servant of my work than its boss. I intuit what it wants, and try my best to maximize its fruition. This, too, resembles dreaming; it’s all coming from a part of my mind that I don’t fully control. I’m in the audience.

I believe the purpose of art lies in the viewer’s (or listener’s or reader’s) reckoning with it. We don’t have a good word for that encounter. “Kapow,” maybe. But we all hope for it – that spark of connection between maker and recipient. It can be sensible or not, just like all love. We create for one another.

David L. Cooper
2025