No one at the Garrison Art Center benefit in November took more painstaking care to design a conical hat at the invitation of the hosts than Melissa Small Cooper, who drew detailed hibiscus flowers.
She and her husband, Brett, are raising three young daughters (the eldest is 6). Cooper, 38, teaches art at Peekskill High School and says it can be challenging to find time to create. If she can block off eight hours or so to sit at her studio space near the kitchen of their home in Glenham, “I bury myself in the art and the time goes by like that,” she says.
This month, two of her paintings are being shown at venues hosting receptions on the same day (Jan. 11). One will be in the Annual Member Show at the Garrison Art Center, the other at the Wallkill River Center for the Arts in Montgomery.
Cooper’s work is ever-evolving. Her primary medium is oil on canvas, but she tries to knock her skills out of rhythm using pastel or gouache (akin to watercolor) or by completing one-day miniflowers on wood discs that lack the precision of her series featuring a hand grasping a flower, with shadows.
“I was getting too obsessed with the details, so I thought I’d try a new approach,” she says. To expand her outlook, Cooper also took a pottery class at the art center, where she is a board member.
Some of her paintings delineate fine lines and lifelike detail: a shimmer of light glimmering off a fingernail, the folds of flesh in a knuckle or the sun reflecting off of blue pool water. Others, like depictions of her late dog or the Golden Gate Bridge, are more impressionistic.
A pristine portrait of her daughter in the Wallkill show is another stretch. “I heard about the show and figured it would be good to flex those muscles,” she says. The image is drawn from one of hundreds — possibly thousands — of photos on her phone, which she calls “reference shots.”
Another series of paintings features cosmetics containers. In contrast to her detailed flowers and hands, which many artists find difficult to render, some of the shapes are geometrically asymmetrical and the shadows resemble smudges. Many of the pieces contain words and faint phrases.
Cooper enjoys gardening, but the recurring flowery focus emerged after her aunt’s funeral. “Everyone got a random flower when they came in, and the image of people standing there hit me,” she says. The hand models include friends and her sister.
As Cooper’s success blossoms, she promotes her work whenever possible. In addition to a solo show at the Burgin Center for the Arts at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, a few paintings hang at Foxtrot Fine Arts in Driggs, Idaho, a gallery operated by a former professor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
A note in her sketchbook, filled with detailed ballpoint pen creations, reads: “I will draw in my sketchbook every evening after the kids go to sleep.” So far, she’s been disciplined: “Some days I get no sleep and focus on the task at hand, which is bliss for me. Other times, I have to work in spurts. But I’m never not working.”
The Annual Member Show at the Garrison Art Center, 23 Garrison’s Landing, opens Jan. 11 with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. and continues through Jan. 26. For more of Cooper’s art, see melissasmall.com.
