Like the ground
turning green in a spring wind.
Like birsdsing beginning inside the egg.
Like this universe coming into existence,
the lover wakes and whirls in a dancing joy
then kneels down in praise. - Rumi
In the last century and a half we have seen a progressive secularization of American culture and art. This is remarkable because in tracing the history of art over the millennia one of its most consistent themes has been the depiction of humanity’s relationship with the sacred. Artists working in every medium have sought to express that which is ineffable, of the spirit. This was true even as artists began to abandon clearly religious subjects in favor of a more personal depiction of what was sacred for them. Early Pioneers of modern art like Kandinsky, Mondrian, Duchamps, Pollack and Rotho all found inspiration and grounding for their work from spiritual sources. Many of them drew inspiration from the East, from Hindu and Buddhist ideas and practices. The goal of these artists was to express a reality beyond the world of the ordinary senses.
Perhaps the 1912 text by Vassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, says it best.
“When religion, science and morality are shaken (the last by the strong hand of Nietzche) and when outer supports threaten to fall, man withdraws his gaze from externals and turns it inwards. Literature, music and art are the most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what was at first only a little point of light noticed by the few. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but they turn away from the soulless life of the present toward those substances and ideas that give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul.” (Kandinsky)
How timely these words of almost a century ago feel today! It is from the predominately secular life of the present that the luminous paintings of Don Cooper emerge.
The course of Don Cooper’s work over the past 20 years has had as its magnetic center a curiosity about the customs, arts and culture of the Far East. Cooper’s interest in things Asian started in grade school where a large 3-D map of Asia graced the wall of his classroom and deepened later through his experiences while serving in Viet Nam and traveling in Japan, China and India. The rich metaphors for the sacred as seen in Buddhism, Tantra and Hinduism have consistently lit the canvases and watercolors he has created.
From the mid 1980’s Coopers work contained images of luminous human and animal figures in watery forests that were soon followed by serene Buddhas. These too were replaced with more symbolic images of the sacred; the Buddha’s Hand and the lotus flower come to mind. Cooper’s travels in China on the deep and whirlpool ridden surface of the Yangtze River evoked for him writings in ancient texts depicting a Cosmic Egg that “floated in the Primordial Sea for over One Thousand Years.” The center of the Cosmic Egg is represented by a single dot, the Bindu, the seed of the Original Creation. Of the many definitions given for this dot, I found this one to be the most comprehensive:
“The Bindu is a sacred point of origin and return with concentric circles symbolizing the eternal cycles of cosmic involution and evolution.” (Yantra)
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