At Laurel Park Elementary School I help with an Art project called “Artists All Around Us”. This project rotates art that is produced by an active member of the school community; it can be a faculty member, student, or parent. The goal is to remind everyone, students especially, that art and artists are an active part of the school community. To learn more about this project, please see the post for the Barn Quilt Installment.
This is the second installment by one of the 3rd grade teachers. It is a beautiful series of black and white flowers.
Mrs. Cooper’s Artist Statement:
Most people would say that color and fragrance are what make a flower beautiful. Black and white images encourage us to appreciate instead textures, shapes, and contrasts and to look more closely at a structural beauty flowers possess.
My interest in photography grew out of a series of fortunate events. It began in high school when I was given my first 35 mm SLR camera, a Nikkormat that my father brought back from Vietnam. Shortly afterwards, during a high school internship with a local photographer, I learned the artistry of working with black and white prints from cropping for composition to dodging and highlighting and modifying exposure. After high school, access to darkrooms was difficult. So my interest lay dormant for some time. Then the digital age brought my interest back to life. Using a Nikon digital camera and Photoshop on my computer I could once again feel the magic of creating images that represented beauty to me. Best of all, to my delight, turning on an Epson ink jet printer and using archival ink and archival paper was much less complicated than setting up a darkroom.
With my renewed interest, black and white images of flowers became a theme I adopted and have enjoyed for several years. Three of my prints have hung in juried shows in three states: Columbia, Missouri; Estes Park, Colorado; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The print on display in Missouri’s show was awarded first place.
E. Durie Cooper
