"This is the forest primeval," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote in his poem "Evangeline." Through his words, the noted Romanticist poet captured the purest essence and the mythical beauty of the American wilderness.
Following in the footsteps of Longfellow, Jacob Cooley, a young contemporary painter whose work will come to the University on May 30, also idealizes the mundane. Cooley's nocturnal landscapes pay homage to the simple splendor of American landscape through his use of intensely involved brushstrokes.
The University Union's Visual Arts Committee is sponsoring Cooley's plainly-titled, but nonetheless metaphorically and personally meaningful exhibition, "New Paintings and Drawings," which will be shown in the Bryan Center's Louise Jones Brown Gallery.
The featured artist, a Durham resident, has held many selective exhibitions in the Triangle Area, South Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
From a distance, Cooley's paintings may appear to be photographs that portray the dusk-veiled horizon with a dazzling contrast of light and dark. In fact, these paintings are mental photographs; they are images ensnared by Cooley's lenses and stored in the film of his memories.
"This imagery is loaded with recollection," Cooley said. "It is the storehouse of my memory and identity, my sense of place. These spaces speak to me about growing up-watching blurred, barely illuminated, overgrown landscapes rush by the windows of a traveling car. Colors and shapes as fleeting, intensely saturated form. They are about that energy."
Upon a closer look, one can see that Cooley was able to convey the inherent truths of Mother Nature through the most simple imagery.
"By reflecting images generally untouched by contemporary society, I am commenting on what to me is authentic-the underlying truths in nature," he said.
His paintings, however, are more than petty attempts at replicating Gaea's unspoiled glory. Collectively, they embody Cooley's personal ideals: He sees our contemporary social state as one of vacuous materialism devoid of aesthetic or spiritual values.
"There are no shopping centers or nuclear power plants or people in these paintings because in many ways, I am rejecting the later 20th century as a time of spiritual emptiness, obsessive consumerism and aesthetic desolation."
In this sense, Cooley believes his paintings are "escapist." To him, they assume the role of an oasis from "a confined and destructive society."
"I am reveling in what to me is basic, earthy and profoundly essential to issues of my consciousness-the simple calm and deep-rooted permanence of landscape," stated the young artist.
For additional information, call 684-4741 or 684-2911.
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