LEE COOPER 

About

Lee Cooper has returned to the visual arts after a brief hiatus of 50 years.
He joined the UCLA faculty in 1969 in a highly quantitative area that anticipated the big-data era of today. By 1974, he was also a member of Workshop I.E., a cooperative artists studio on Main Street in Santa Monica, doing limited-edition prints, co-owned the Cooper Gallery on Robertson, served as Director of the UCLA Management in the Arts Program, was the Co-Founder and first President of the Association of Arts Administration Educators. Cooper co-authored "The Arts in the Economic Life of the City," published by the American Council for the Arts. By 1979, Cooper shifted full focus to his primary academic agenda.
Photography has been a lifelong interest and activity. With an archive of images spanning decades, Cooper returned to printmaking in the Summer of 2022. Master printer, Eric Joseph, guided Cooper’s return to printmaking with the new, digital technologies. Aside from printmaking, Cooper has recently been elected to the Board of the Los Angeles Ballet and, of course, selected as a Lazarus Member of TAG – The Artists Gallery.

Artist Statement

In 2022 I faced the empty walls of a new apartment overlooking the Atlantic in Cádiz, Spain. I asked, “What art do I want to see here every day?” The Cooper Gallery Collection displays the results. My blogs, “Where I See Beauty in the World,” “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” and “Real Time Goes Too Fast,” elaborate my developing esthetic. For current photography, the interplay of shape, color, and light draws me to a point of view from which I hope to capture a fleeting moment in time and the fine detail that fuels stories of place. In taking new photos now, I more actively look for beauty at fast changing times: dawn, magic hour/sunset, or moon rise. These beautiful moments merit further contemplation than the changing light allows.
Then comes the process of transforming the digital image in an archival print. I’ve enjoyed learning the new technologies that let me get in the print what I see on the screen. I found that the new pigment inks create luminous images under museum lights, better viewed without glass. When I see on the screen something I wish I could have painted, I hit “Print.”