In 2021, after a 34 year career at MTA New York City Transit, including 20 years as Director, Operations Analysis, Shoshana Cooper retired, allowing her to focus on creating art. Before her retirement, Shoshana studied painting at the Art Students League, where she is a life member. Her instructors included John Hultberg and Fred Mitchell.
As Cooper’s art progressed, her work became more abstract. For over ten years, she created reverse acrylic paintings on clear plastic. While this method intensified color, it provided limited opportunity to make changes as a piece progressed. Also, the reliance on plastic was not environmentally sound.
In 2007, Shoshana read that Willem de Kooning used newspapers to keep his paintings wet as he worked on them and the transferred paint created interesting images, some of which were included in an exhibition in 1965. As an experiment, she placed some paper dipped in paint several times on a painting in progress. Although each application of the paper was similar to a monotype, the end result had several layers which interacted with each other.
She continues to use acrylic paint mainly on watercolor paper, employing this technique of multiple paint to paper transfers as well as using sponges, stencils, paper towels, palette knives, and occasionally even brushes to create vibrant improvisational works.
Shoshana has also started to create a series of abstract collages from parts of older paintings on paper, mylar and plastic as well as from smaller pieces of paper used to make the multiple impressions on the larger paintings. These collages are mounted on cardboard, old paintings on plastic and frames discarded by neighbors.
Shoshana has exhibited her work in a few group shows in Brooklyn and is now happy to be a member of Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists.
In addition to her art education, Shoshana completed her undergraduate studies at Brandeis University with a double major in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Sociology. She earned certificates from the Schwartz Program at Hebrew University and the Central School of Management of Israeli Civil Service.
Shoshana lives with her husband, David F. Cooper in Windsor Terrace.
