About the Artist

Originally from Brooklyn New York, Charles Cooper is a visual artist and art educator who lives in New Jersey with his family. After his discharge from the Marine Corps, he enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Pennsylvania where he received a BFA in Illustration in 1988. He attended the Yale University Graduate School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut where he received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking in 1995.

Charles is an American figurative artist whose work is about interiority, intimacy, and vulnerability. The work explores the healing and transformative power of the self to address trauma, loss, alienation, and issues of identity. He weaves together direct observation and photographic images with memories, fantasies, and dreams into multilayered and intensely personal narratives and compositions filled with personal symbolism and art historical references. These open-ended imagined narratives, which the artist describes as emerging as if from a lucid dream, aim to capture the emotional and psychological undertow flowing beneath the fabric of the familiar and ordinary experiences of life. His work is a visual metaphor that reimagines the world through personal myth-making and searching for poetic truth.

Charles has exhibited his work nationally in galleries and museums. His work is in various private and public collections including the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts and the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey.