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From Pandemic,

‘Tender, Funny’

Paintings Emerge

By LIBBY CUDMORE • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com

COOPERSTOWN – The blank canvas stretches nearly to the top of Ashley Norwood Cooper’s studio, more than 10 feet tall.

“I did a painting called ‘The Girl’s Room,’ which had women playing guitar and doing art,” she said. “I think this is going to be similar, with women changing a light bulb. I’ll need a big ladder to paint it, though!”

The planned painting is one of many the artist, who is gaining a reputation well beyond Otsego County, has been doing while in quarantine since March. “My paintings
have always been about people at home,” she said.

“It fits, now, because it’s the only place we’re allowed to be. And Cooperstown in winter – or a May snowstorm! – is a great place to get work done.”

“Easter Eggs,” for example, shows a family gathered around a TV with the breaking news of the virus, with magnified coronaviruses hidden throughout the scene.

“My son Gil came up with the title,” she said. “They were hidden, like Easter eggs.”
Another Easter egg to look for – the cats in her paintings. In “The Girl’s Room,” the feline is seated next to the guitar player, in “Easter Egg,” there’s one killing a mouse.

“Bruegel” – the Flemish Renaissance painter – “had this painting of children ice skating, but in the foreground you see all these birds around a trap,” she said. “It’s foreboding, it symbolizes plagues, and in this case, we’re like the mouse.”

Cooper’s most recent show at the Volta Art Fair was written about in the New York Times. “Tender and funny, the works stopped me in my tracks,” wrote Times Art Critic Jill Steinhauer.

“COVID-19 hit right after I got back,” Cooper said. “I painted obsessively. Someone asked, ‘Aren’t you depressed?’ and I said ‘No, I am painting’.”

She has not only used the quarantine to create more of her paintings, but to share them as well.

“There’s no way to show in galleries,” she said. “But I saw that some galleries were putting their paintings in the windows so people who walked by could see them.”

On Saturday, May 2, Cooper held a Drive-By, Walk-By Exhibit in front of her Lake Street home, inviting people to see six of her most recent works without fear of a crowded gallery in which to spread the virus.

The show was a hit. “I decided to do it about 12 hours before I put out the paintings,” she said. “But it was a great day, and a lot of people came!”

Cooper, who has lived with her family in Cooperstown since 2002, is no stranger to painting in isolation. In 2014, she painted a series called “Deployment” that showed her family’s life – built around the iPad that she used to communicate with her husband, Dr. Shelby Cooper, when the Navy a lieutenant commander was deployed to Afghanistan for nine months.

“This brings it all back,” she said. “We’re all communicating over the Internet again.”
These days, the family is pitching in with her. “My kids are my studio assistants,” she said. “Trent is helping me stretch canvases, Gil is helping me build panels.”

And she noted that although she paints figures, she doesn’t use her family as models – not directly, anyway. “I paint all from memory,” she said. “So it’s not like they’re really modeling for me. But the kids in my paintings tended to be a lot younger 10 years ago!”

With her planned show at Zinc Contemporary in Seattle likely cancelled, she hopes to have another drive-by show at the end of the summer. In the meantime, she’s prepping for her next push of paintings, including “Change.”

“I’ve spent a week just priming the surface of this canvas!” she said.