Ashley Cooper’s Latest Paintings Depict

Husband’s Deployment Bridged By iPad

By JIM KEVLIN • Special to allotsego.com

COOPERSTOWN

In 2012, the Coopers’ seemingly serene existence, in their Lake Street home that backs up on Glimmerglass, was jolted as the father of the house, Bassett’s Dr. Shelby Cooper – he is also a lieutenant commander in the Navy – was deployed to Afghanistan for nine months.

“All of your paintings are about anxiety,” said his artist wife, Ashley Norwood Cooper, sitting in her backyard studio the other day amid her latest creations. “You have to paint about it.”

But how to capture absence?

While the doctor was physically gone, he was present via texting – “You left your scarf at the Moglias last night,” he reminded her his first day away.  And once he was established at the NATO base in Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, FaceTime enabled the Coopers, via iPads, to see each other’s faces – a bit distorted – and talk, often for hours through the night, from across the world.

Artist Hosts ‘Open Studio’ 2-5 Sunday At 14 Lake St., Cooperstown

Ashley started painting cutaways, juxtaposing her husband overseas with family scenes at home.  But the iPad had become such a central part of family life, perhaps it was just a matter of time until it became the focus of Ashley’s art.

One of the first experiments, “New Hat,” is of son Gil holding up an iPad showing him in the Sherpa hat he picked up at the 2013 Cooperstown Winter Carnival.

Soon, the artist’s point of view takes over, as in the iconic image – of the iPad resting against the artist’s knees as she lies in bed, her forefinger touching her husband’s lips on the screen.  That painting leads off “Deployment,” the catalogue Ashley assembled on this phase of her work.

Samples were on display in June at the Novella Gallery in New York City’s Lower East Side, and again in  September and October at “Openings NY,” a group show at St. Paul the Apostle Church near Columbus Circle.

And they will be on display locally 2-5 p.m. tomorrow – Sunday, Dec. 7 – in an “open studio” at 14 Lake St., where Ashley’s friend, the writer Marly Youmans, will also be on hand, signing copies of “Glimmerglass,” her new novel.

All of the paintings in this sequence are on board, which accepts mediums ranging from pencil to the thick, handmade Williamsburg oils developed by Carl Plansky in Pindars Corners, (now produced by Golden Artists Colors in New Berlin).

Raised in Greenville, S.C., the artist attended the University of Georgia, majoring in Latin, and was teaching Latin when she met her husband.  They married, and when he returned to Indiana University in Bloomington to study medicine, she studied art.

The Coopers have been in Cooperstown for a dozen years, and have three children.

While her husband returned in the fall of 2013, Ashley’s paintings continue to explore the role of electronics in communication.  “I still have more of these I have to do,” she said, adding, “I think it will open the door to something else.”

The final painting in the catalogue, again from the artist’s point of view, shows Shelby, expressionless, across the table.  The artist has a paint brush in her right hand, an active iPhone in the left.

“Long periods of separation are a challenge to any marriage, and when a soldier or sailor is demobilized there is always a period of adjustment,” she writes in the adjacent catalogue entry.  “Some of these problems were made easier for Shelby and me by our Internet communication.

“At the same time, what got me through the whole event was what gets me through everything: love and art.”