antipodes

I lost the first round. We were looking at a canal scene of Venice that he had painted and I mentioned that once on art business I had stayed in that city for a month. Warren Cooper, a tall man of 79 years with clear, blue eyes and the kind of thick, white hair that elects men to Presidencies, sensed that behind the factual banality of my comment was a maneuver, common to first encounters, to establish our relative social positions. He neatly countered with, “ Oh, I’ve been to Italy many times as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of New Zealand.”

“When other kids liked comics, I liked color charts”, said Mr. Cooper about his first visual stirrings. From this innate attraction grew an early career as a sign painter in 1940’s Queenstown, a small but growing city on the south island of New Zealand. He did not have an apprenticeship in the trade, but taught himself from manuals. For it’s roundness, Mr. Cooper likes the typeface, “Cooper”, but the shared name is a coincidence, he says.

As a young entrepreneur, he encouraged clients to do big signs with artwork like the iconic Esso Tiger he once painted for an oil company on Main Street. More than the supplier of bold advertizing for local merchants, Mr. Cooper offered his community and his country years of service, first as Mayor of Queenstown, then as a Member of Parliament, and finally as a cabinet member in the Muldoon and Bolger administrations.

Now, Mr. Cooper has retired and has returned to painting with zeal. Working mostly from photographs that he finds in books, magazines and newspapers, he favors landscape subjects. Expecting to hear sentiment of deep attachment to natural scenery, I asked Mr. Cooper why he favors the genre.  He replied, “I have a huge difficulty doing bodies, I should practice.” Landscape, it seems, is a practical choice, since it is a more manageable subject than the human figure.

But he did hint, later in the conversation, of softer motivations. For one, he’s fond of the Tuscan landscape, a place he has visited many times and now paints often. Not one to gush, Mr. Cooper said of Italy, “If I just see it on TV, I immediately think I wish I was there.”

But the house is full of paintings, and I sensed a passion for the act that was more than a chance to relive pleasant memories. So what is driving Mr. Cooper’s desire to paint? “Winston Churchill”, said Mr. Cooper. “When he retired he spent time either brick laying or landscape painting. You can get lost in both. That’s the nice part about it, if the work is going well, you can do it for two hours and it would seem like 45 minutes. You can escape in it.”

So there it is; painting like brick laying is a place to enter time and be a part of it rather than sit outside of it and watch it slowly pass by.