A builder and banana farmer, Cooper has lived in Bathurst and on the north coast of NSW
at Woolgoolga and nearby Yarrawarra Aboriginal Cultural Centre where he was
given opportunities to paint and create.
Cooper manages his own art business and sells works from the
Cooper’s Koori Creations shop and website (www.cooperskooricreations.com). He
is hoping for an invitation to work again in Innsbruck with the design firm Swarovski
Crystals. “I spent some time there in 2002,” says Cooper. “I have a work on
display beside works by Salvador Dali and Brian Eno!”
Listening to Cooper talk about his life and passion for his
art, it is evident that the journey is for him intensely personal. He has
chosen art as a way of life: chosen art over football, over farming, over what
may have been a more conventional existence. And there is a spiritual
dimension, too – a sense in which art has chosen him. “It’s something deep
within my spirit,” he says. Te artist is not averse to invoking the divine.
“My work is about God’s mercy,” he says, before recounting a
time he was lost, without direction, on the verge of alcoholism. Ten, trying to
achieve too many goals – without the sense of commitment to a calling, a
purpose in life. Tere was resentment,
too. Someone he hadn’t been able to forgive. “God showed me
how that other person was feeling – the heavy burden he was carrying – and how
I was making it worse. I try to show that mercy in my paintings.”
Te forms such “mercy” takes include pristine landscapes and
social scenes free of the destructive presence of pollution, alcohol and drugs.
Tere is a naïve quality to Cooper’s work. Te colours are bright, sunlit; the figures
– brolgas, emus, goannas, kangaroos, turtles, and human figures – are graphic,
stylized. Certainly accessible, Cooper’s creations inhabit a space between what
he calls an “Aboriginal” and “European” worldview. At its best, the work
embodies a promise of healthy and harmonious life in community.
Photo: Caity Burridge – Darren Cooper with a large work
entitled ‘Sunset Waterfall’ (acrylic on canvas)
Source South Sydney Herald September 2007 – www.southsydneyherald.com.au