Transatlantic collaborations

Left to right: Hamadi ben Saad, artist; Ray Cooper, artist; Professor Cathy West, Converse College; Hamadi's assistant. Tunis, January 2010

Just returned from Tunisia where Converse College Professor Cathy West and I helped Tunisian artist Hamadi ben Saad select his new work for our upcoming exhibit, Transatlantic Voyages, at Converse College, February - March 2010.

Part of this Converse College student tour included a collaborative art project for the students with Hamadi. He works with found materials - paper, rags, cardboard, anything - to make collages. Using American papers that I had gathered as found art material, Hamadi led the students in a group collage project.

Hamadi, with every work of art, creates "a little dream" of hope. I try as well.

Spiritual clarity in a troubled world is the goal I have determined to pursue artistically. This view through turmoil toward a hopeful, luminous future is art that the world needs now.

Overwhelming problems? Certainly, for everyone. Despair? No! I promote an attempt to understand across cultural barriers and national borders.

I use art to understand reality. Even abstract art reflects essences of the natural world. Some realism is a far remove from photo images of the surface of things. My painting wants to get at the spirit of matter. All things are connected and common ground can be established where discord prevails, if only a will to do so is encouraged.

I am concerned with how an image feels as well as how it looks. Therefore, some paintings are abstract and some are figurative, while both are about the same reality. I attempt to beguile the viewer with beautiful paint. It helps in the acceptance of the ideas I present over and over: birth, death, transcendence. Sublime if not pretty, reality is beautiful. Look to the light to try to get over our problems. Start again each day to set things right. This is an endless journey of hope.


Hamadi on the roof of his studio with a mural he recently exhibited in Germany.

My artistic journey

My origins are rural northeast Washington State, near Canada and the Columbia River in the 40’s and 50’s. I first encountered painting when I took the train, at sixteen, to Seattle to see the Vincent Van Gogh retrospective in 1958. Before that I was a cartoonist. After that, never again a cartoonist. I began to see the world through the process of painting. (My parents were disturbed by Post-Impressionist early modernist influences in my first paintings.) It was a calling, a life long journey.

After high school I traveled, first to California for an episode in art school. Then Mexico to see Orozco’s murals. Later, Amsterdam for Rembrandt, Florence for Masaccio, et cetera, and in my maturity, Paris, Rome, and Tunis. Subsequent trips to France, Italy and Tunisia further ignited my creative process. But it would be years before I finally resolved to focus seriously on my painting.

Over the years I made my living as a landscape designer and laborer. Close enough to art, but closer to a regular income. At times the physical effort left me too exhausted to engage in art. Even with the physical demand of gardening, I attempted to paint with various degrees of satisfaction. It wasn’t that I was a Sunday painter with a hobby. Living required that I paint. I never really abandoned my calling as an artist, but this period was a virtual purgatory, artistically speaking. There were moments of successes and recognition that kept me knowing that there was something in my vision. It wasn’t until I was sixty that I reached my limit. No longer young, I questioned what I could do better as an aging man than I did in youth.

One morning eight years ago, while putting on my work boots I checked my calendar to see which yard today, and I saw that it was my birthday. Sixty! I removed my boots, resolved to paint instead. This day, and the day forty-four years earlier, visiting the Van Gogh Retrospective, were the epiphany moments. "Paint! Paint now."

But where to begin? Paint what? Paint what you know, that is a good rule. I knew landscaping as a gardener, so I started again with landscape paintings, abstract landscape paintings. In art school I had applied myself only to drawing and art history. Out of these components I started over, challenging myself to paint every day. To teach myself how to handle paint, how to truly notice what was emerging through my daily practice.

After years of landscape labor, I realized that I had unintentionally found my theme: The mystery of life seen through seasons, generations, evolution, and transcendence. It's been nearly a decade of continued focus now, and I am pleased with what is unfolding.

I haven’t exhibited much, know little about the art scene, and have avoided artists’ colonies. My friends are writers, musicians, animals and books. (Humans are the animals who read.)

Professor Catherine West at Converse College conducts student tours in France and Tunisia. Through her interest in art and philosophy, she’s developed a friendship with Tunisian artist, Hamadi ben Saad who does large abstract collages and figurative work. In Tunisia, she introduced me to Hamadi. I admire his friendly embrace of the world, his productivity, and his artistic vision.

It was Cathy who recognized something in each of our work that is compatible. Stylistically he is one thing and I am another, but we share a Both/And approach, abstract and figurative.

Hamadi ben Saad and I will have a show at Converse College, Spartanburg, SC, in February-March 2010. Our exhibit explores transatlantic voyages and mutual respect.
Please come dialogue with us.