World travel and love of Art History both inform Cooley’s art. Primarily a printmaker, she is also a painter, who draws on her life in Shanghai, China, where she studied under an ink painting master. Soft brushes with China ink are used on unsized Xuan paper, then embellished with various designs, often with metallic paint.
Her painterly monoprints have lately found a place in her small collages, where they are torn and cut, and arranged to create small evocations, sometimes harkening to medieval manuscript illuminations, which the artist considers magical. Accents of 23k. gold leaf are used along with old script collected in world markets, and printed on thin Japanese papers.
Before China, Cooley lived for fifteen years in Africa, Asia and South America. The resulting perspective of cultures together with printmaking studies in Italy, South Africa and the US, have melded into a world view of dreamlike quality. A believer that process can be more important than product, her prints produce a wordless language based in dreams and aspirations.
Cooley’s work is in many collections both in the U.S. and abroad.