Plethora Artist Guild would like to welcome our newest member and Assistant Curator, Garrett Cooper!
Artist Statement:
Garrett Cooper uses tools, techniques borrowed from his job as an interior painter to investigate the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects through use of geometric forms in a created space. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.
His paintings reference linear, almost recognizable forms. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By applying abstraction, he tries to develop forms that follow specific logical criteria, but are based only on loose, subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations using color, form and line.
He creates abstract, color-fuelled landscapes using a line that has been left by a more tactile body – that of painter’s tape. He allows the paint to move freely on the canvas and merely tries to corral the viscous medium using the tape. The compounding layers of paint dictate the conscious traces left. Consolidation is the end goal- it isn’t until all of the tape has been lifted that a piece can be coined as “finished.”
His works establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. By choosing mainly formal solutions and skill from “on-the-job” experience, he attempts to create moments of the sublime through various additive and subtractive procedures.
His works are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. The pieces he creates seem to have an inherent want of people to enjoy and interact with them on an emotional level.
Plethora Artist Guild 