Cora Cohen Trust

A Personal History

Monograph cover

May 19, 2026

A Personal History

Cora Cohen

This essay was published in Cora Cohen (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026)

This essay was compiled from various artist’s statements Cora Cohen made over the years, as well as notes, lecture transcripts, and interviews, specifically an interview conducted by Manfred Eingesser via phone and email, 2020–22. It was published in Cora Cohen, (Gregory R. Miller & Co. (D.A.P.), 2026).

I was born in New York to a family that valued art and culture. Their idea of modern art was abstraction: Braque, Picasso, Miró, Mondrian, and I. Rice Pereira were some of the artists I looked at growing up, along with the American modernists. I thought of art as something available, familiar—almost homey—and malleable. It could become political like Käthe Kollwitz, gnarly like Max Beckmann or Georges Rouault, or aestheticized like Édouard Vuillard—all of whom I was introduced to in my New York high school, along with contemporary art. I also liked to play on the street as a child, and make messes or concoct things with materials, for no reason or purpose.

I went to Bennington College [Vermont], graduating in 1964 and earning my master’s in 1972. There, the aesthetic in painting was soft hard-edge and color field (think Paul Feeley). Welded steel, both expressive and formal, prevailed in sculpture (as in the work of David Smith or Anthony Caro). I learned from Tony Smith about architectural notions, and the idea that there could be such a thing as a world view. The resolutely American New England-ness of the region, and the introduction of industrial materials and methods with which to make art, helped reorganize my ideas.1

My idea of art when I started out was art without image: painting independent of likeness, autonomous, devoid of all connotations and associations that resemblance brings. My early paintings were informed by an American and European modernist aesthetic—Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove for their naturalistic and landscape elements, and Albert Pinkham Ryder for his brooding expressionism achieved through dense application of paint. I learned from Joan Miró and from the color field painters—particularly Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski—how to make paintings that were large and ambitious, yet also appeared physically light.2 When I returned to Bennington as a graduate fellow in 1970, one of my undergraduate drawing students, the artist Liz Phillips, opened me up to a world of contemporary sound (Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich), and a world that subverted visual form (Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus), that stretched the way I thought about visual art.

At Bennington, criticism was primarily the formalism taught by Clement Greenberg, although I connected more to the alternative voices of Lawrence Alloway and Eugene Goossen.3 I found Greenberg’s formalism deracinated the work itself, removing the practice of painting from any sense of the world. Artist and viewer alike were to consider a painting as an autonomous object, outside of its psychological, social, and economic context. This resulted in a binary approach—painterly vs. linear, figure vs. ground, the split between form and content—which was not only restrictive, but also insidious, as it left room for an aggressive assertion of a favored look and style.4

For me, interesting work doesn't have that kind of rigidity—figure isn’t necessarily on top of ground; absence and presence can change places—and the work is also linked to how we relate to people and how we communicate.5 How I live informs how I make all my work.6 It asserts the existence of the world at large, and somehow enables that world to enter in the work.7

By the early 1980s, I had become interested in expressing force and aggression by foregrounding the material qualities of paint.8 I’d been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983, and it was there I realized how important painting was to me—not just art, but specifically painting. I had taken only red, yellow, and blue paint with me, and resumed working in oils, moving the paint around with a small brush. When I returned to New York, the gallerist and critic Klaus Kertess introduced me to Joan Mitchell. She suggested I needed a bigger brush, and as I started to work larger, the paint became heavier and thicker. In hindsight, I can see I was teaching myself how to make the paintings I wanted to make, in a way I never had: dense paintings with a worked quality, the stroke small in relation to the whole.9

Technical aspects of Willem de Kooning’s work from the 1950’s served as a model, and I became increasingly involved in the phenomenology of figuration. My canvases captured the drama of nascent, almost-recognizable forms struggling to come into being, only to recede back into abstraction. Philip Guston’s work from the late 1950s to early 1960s was a source of inspiration, as was Alberto Giacometti’s painting and sculpture.10 Joan continued to offer me friendship, advice, and encouragement through the late 1980s, and invited me to visit her in France.11 There, the region's Romanesque architecture further broadened my view of what painting could be. Monumental structures that position the human subject in relation to the cosmos became an important consideration for me. Sites like the Acropolis, El Alcázar de Cordoba, Moissac, and St. Severin gave me a sense of art as something vast while remaining in touch with the fundamental human impulse to navigate the world in search of physical, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment.

During the 1980s, painting came under attack from postmodern critics for being conservative and outmoded. By the 1990s, feminist circles had further discredited abstract painting as a bastion of male privilege. Yet I reaffirmed my commitment to this powerful tradition as a viable form of expression for myself and others. I believe the act of painting grows out of older forms of visual expression connected to the realm of the spirit. It connotes a belief in the value of individual, personal, subjective experience that honors and perpetuates the most basic of humanist values. Any assertion of a transcendent sublime by American modernist painters has long been in retreat, yet painting still redeems the possibilities of the human imagination.

In the ’90s, my approach became more resolutely one of inclusiveness—in visuality, and in my use of materials. I felt that the standard painting studio materials—pristine tubes of oil paint, appropriate mediums, and solvents—were not enough to re-create in my work the sensual experience of living. Seeing women and men becoming sick and dying on the streets of New York and other American cities, I felt that I was witnessing the decay of our society—of any idea of a society. I wanted to make paintings that would study and grapple with uncontrollable forces and the messiness of the human environment, rather than remain within the safety of the minimal or the limitations of the pure. Disorder, irresolution, unfinished space— these aspects of nature and the uncontrolled side effects of our culture's material abundance are horrible and fascinating. There is a raw truth in these things that has led me toward an art that is opulent and gritty, inviting conflict.

Between 1991 and 1992, I was working out of two studios—one in Chicago, one in New York—and the deal in Chicago was that the studio floor had to be kept clean. At the end of my time there, I had a show coming up in New York, so in order to have as much as possible to work with, I packed up the drop cloths I’d used in Chicago and sent them to New York, where I began painting on them. Working on such base and trampled surfaces was a challenge, but the process opened up possibilities. Eventually, the drop cloths became paintings.

I also began to incorporate other materials: elements from the earth, crushed graphite, copper, marble dust, aluminum, iron oxide, and mundane urban elements including scraps, trash, and studio debris. My interest in heterogeneity—rather than formal unity—expanded. I relied on pours and chemical processes, such as the oxidation of copper, to produce a series of contrasts between areas of luminous color and bleak dullness. I then intervened with some of the pours to make them less continuous and graceful. At times I initiated new chemical processes that affected portions of the canvas at different rates and in starts and stops. Some of these works possess a certain gritty beauty; many are decidedly unpretty.

In the mid ’90s, I began working on developing new marking systems that I applied to found objects, mostly exposed X-ray films taken of those who had died of AIDS. I intervened on the X-rays with chemicals and color, at times to transform the image of the diseased parts, at times as an intuitive response to them. I consider these Altered X-Rays to be elegies for the dead as they lament the loss of human touch, while my transformations act as gestures that seek to restore that touch, knowing full well that’s impossible. I also began to draw and photograph my immediate surroundings as a form of visual note-taking, attempting to ground myself in places and cultures. These, like the X-rays, directly and spontaneously record responses to my lived experience. They annotate and comment upon places and events in my life so as to affirm my quotidian existence—aspects of my daily life that I would otherwise surely forget or neglect.

By the end of the ’90s, these ancillary bodies of work fed back into my paintings, allowing elements of contingency, flux, and indeterminacy to inform all of my practice.12 I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make the sort of paintings in which touch was more evident, an art with a greater emotive and psychological resonance. Reintroducing brushwork as surrogate for my touch made my work more reliant on emotive and psychological force.13 I also started removing the virtuosic from my painting, relentlessly working and reworking the surfaces of my small paintings with brush and palette knife. Some of those small paintings became, for me, the embodiment of destructive violence, harnessed and transformed by the act of painting. The larger, more open paintings referred frequently to uncharted spaces such as those one finds between airports and cities—neither industrial nor urban or suburban, only dead zones of topography. I link this with the concept of useless, “wasted” time. Both allow for more human and perhaps more humane ways of feeling and being.14

It’s said that in Eastern art, the viewer has to go into the painting. And while I’m not an Eastern artist, I do try to make art that offers a space in which to roam around and maybe even get lost. Many of my paintings don’t have a lot of obvious drama, but if you become involved in them, they may.15

I’ve also long been interested in our daily sensory visual experience, and how we convert the uncertainties of first sight into coherent, generalized views that make sense of the world. I attempt to affirm the disjuncture inherent in that moment when things are first glimpsed, before an image coheres.16

In many of the paintings of the 2000s, I initiated intensely purposeful lines and shapes on a background of very beautiful, lush skeins and pours of paint. I then deliberately and messily erased them. The resulting palimpsest became the final work. Many of the drawn and painted lines and shapes were derived from projecting earlier paintings of my own, and those of others I admire, onto the pours I had made. I then traced their outlines with charcoal and paint. My intent was to foreground an oscillation between uncertainty and surety, fastness and slowness, to make them the form and substance of the finished work. A history of my discards and overrides remained visible. An image emerged not unlike multiple exposures on a single plate of film.17

Often these paintings developed over many years. I might consciously eradicate opulent, seemingly natural, skeins and pours of paint by scribbling over them with charcoal and pastel, then messily erasing and blurring some of that scribbling. Or I would use the charcoal as a tool to move paint, in order to cut any sense of ease of handling. Such methods reflect my view that nothing is purely natural nor unmitigatedly beautiful, nor ever still or final or closed; that there is never one place, nor one way of being. I also sensed during this period that existence in this new century would be increasingly difficult and hard-won, and I wanted that to filter into my work.18

In 2007, after the loft in which I’d lived and worked for more than thirty years received a vacate order, I began a new body of work I called Nomads. They were my attempt to place myself in a world in which I had lost my place, when I had no permanent home or studio. In the borrowed studio of a friend, I began cutting wood veneer that was on hand, attempting to follow the shapes and forms of Jean Prouvé, the self-taught architect and designer who made structures and furniture for nomadic existences. In doing this, I found unexpected curves and moves. It seemed as if his forms detoured from the expectations they set—as if they were animated—causing me to discard my initial expectations of what a form might have signaled. After gluing the shapes that I cut onto stretched linen, I deployed both oil- and water-based paints to make marks and forms that are antithetical to those shapes. These individual marks often have a solitary bent. I painted onto other shapes, at times integrating them into a larger whole, at other times attempting to eradicate them. The resulting slippages and discrepancies prompted me to include more disparate elements in the rest of my painting. To me, the Nomads would be seen best in liminal spaces, at irregular intervals: on a wall of a staircase opposite an elevator; on the exterior wall of an exhibition gallery; on an interior column. Spaces like these constitute way stations for the works, and such placements lend to consideration of the uncertain and contingent place we have in the world.19

By the 2010s, I was grouping my paintings into separate categories that included Drawings, Curtains, and Tablets. Curtains generally referred to hiding and revealing, relying on the sense of “behind” and “in front of,” nodding to my longtime interest in art expressing the underside of life. Drawings were so-called because someone once said that I wasn’t really making paintings, that my paintings were really big drawings.20

The Tablets paintings were based on the story behind the deciphering of the Minoan Linear B script and some of the elements of script itself: its syllabary, logograms, and pictograms. These were done on paper and linen with water-based paint, raw pigment (evoking clay tablets and archaeological excavation), and, at times, oil. During their making, meaning was displaced by a shift to immaterial information, meant to parallel the attempts at the actual deciphering of Linear B script. All these paintings continued to develop out of acts and erasures, with a new image constructed through form and its displacement.21 Then, in the fall of 2014, I shifted my practice toward an emphasis on what might be considered conventionally beautiful color.22 The following year, I began a series of Meanders, largely on paper but with a few paintings as well.23

The pandemic of 2020 affected my life in general, and my work as an artist in particular. Support for Black Lives Matter grew and became increasingly diverse, yet police killings of Black people continued unchecked. Peaceful demonstrations were increasingly met with hostility and overt violence, and I became even more alienated from American culture, particularly the legal system.

My main studio helper left New York in the spring, and when the pandemic hit hardest, I asked the others to stay home. I began doing the preparation myself, one at a time, feeling real pressure to make something beautiful in the face of the criminally unnecessary deaths and degradation of many. Doing the preparation was settling, and it was a way of connecting to the future painting.24 I wanted to return to my own beginnings as a painter—my love of making things with my hands. So I started making work in my living room, revisiting small paintings and drawings from various periods of my life that I had left unfinished and then abandoned.

The works I made in the spring of 2020 had that sense of urgency. Because I began them at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between life and death, between life and the possibility of an afterlife, and between the past and a radically uncertain future. In some of them I silkscreened parts onto the linen, then washed off the ink while it was wet. It’s not as if there are no traces or signs of the hand on them, but they still look like they were brought in from outer space.25

I now approach each day with an anything can happen mentality. Usually, I have a rough idea or a stance or an attitude that I want my painting to take, or a position that I want my work to have. I have continued working on paintings one at a time, often printing the basic structure of earlier works onto primed linen, then working back into that printed armature directly, introducing conflicting scenarios. I do have a notion of what I want my current work to be, how I want it to present itself. I want to make a painting that is non-finite, ambiguous but at the same time rather serious and non-ironic, a painting one might not notice as a painting. One might walk by it as one does a wall or an unremarkable tree, a method of turning failure into a compelling act.26

I remain committed to the tradition and medium of painting. Through marks on canvas, I convey my experience of the world in all its nuanced complexity. Painting, from the Renaissance on, has remained the most rigorous, durable, and prestigious form of visual expression in Western culture. In the twenty-first century, painting has also become a contradiction to, and form of resistance against, an information age based on digital technology. It demands a meditative calm and deliberate slowness of apprehension that runs counter to the speed and logic of contemporary electronic media. It fosters a way of seeing that rewards stillness and slowness and requires a prolonged, meditative engagement. It has the capability of engaging us fully—not just our minds, but our bodies and hearts. It solicits and nourishes our psychological and spiritual well-being.

Painting can change the world.27

—Cora Cohen, 2023

Notes

1. Cora Cohen, “VSC_talk_2009,” lecture notes used in various versions from 2009–2016. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-13.html.

2. Cora Cohen, “Nov_25Materials,” 2010. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-12.html.

3. Cohen, “VSC_talk_2009.”

4. Cora Cohen, “Greenberg’s_Formalism,” 2015. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-4.html

5. Cora Cohen, “2012 Lecture Notes,” 2012. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-8.html

6. Cora Cohen, “Cohen, Cora (2011)”, 2011. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-10.html

7. Cora Cohen, “SJ_CC_GD_Interview,” 2013. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-6.html

8. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

9. Cora Cohen, in Barry Schwabsky and Cora Cohen, “A Conversation,” 1996. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-15.html

10. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

11. Cora Cohen, “Narrative_long,” 2011. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-11.html

12. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

13. Cohen, “Narrative_long.”

14. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

15. Cora Cohen, in Cora Cohen and Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.” See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-1.html.

16. Cora Cohen, “In daily life we convert the uncertainties of initial seeing,” 2012. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-9.html.

17. Cora Cohen, “Artist’s Statement: George,” 2002. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-14.html.

18. Cohen, “VSC_talk_2009.”

19. Cora Cohen, “Nomads,” 2015. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/by-2.html.

20. Cora Cohen, “SAIC_2016,” 2016. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-3.html.

21. Cora Cohen, “The paintings that I’m working on now,” 2013. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-7.html.

22. Cohen, “SAIC_2016.”

23. Ed.: Information about the series has been added to Cohen’s original statement for clarity and continuity.

24. Cora Cohen, “Now,” 2022.See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/now.html.

25. Cohen, in Cohen and Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

26. Cohen, “Now.”

27. Cohen, “Artist’s Statement: George.”

Monograph cover

May 19, 2026

A Personal History

Cora Cohen

This essay was published in Cora Cohen (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026)

This essay was compiled from various artist’s statements Cora Cohen made over the years, as well as notes, lecture transcripts, and interviews, specifically an interview conducted by Manfred Eingesser via phone and email, 2020–22. It was published in Cora Cohen, (Gregory R. Miller & Co. (D.A.P.), 2026).

I was born in New York to a family that valued art and culture. Their idea of modern art was abstraction: Braque, Picasso, Miró, Mondrian, and I. Rice Pereira were some of the artists I looked at growing up, along with the American modernists. I thought of art as something available, familiar—almost homey—and malleable. It could become political like Käthe Kollwitz, gnarly like Max Beckmann or Georges Rouault, or aestheticized like Édouard Vuillard—all of whom I was introduced to in my New York high school, along with contemporary art. I also liked to play on the street as a child, and make messes or concoct things with materials, for no reason or purpose.

I went to Bennington College [Vermont], graduating in 1964 and earning my master’s in 1972. There, the aesthetic in painting was soft hard-edge and color field (think Paul Feeley). Welded steel, both expressive and formal, prevailed in sculpture (as in the work of David Smith or Anthony Caro). I learned from Tony Smith about architectural notions, and the idea that there could be such a thing as a world view. The resolutely American New England-ness of the region, and the introduction of industrial materials and methods with which to make art, helped reorganize my ideas.1

My idea of art when I started out was art without image: painting independent of likeness, autonomous, devoid of all connotations and associations that resemblance brings. My early paintings were informed by an American and European modernist aesthetic—Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove for their naturalistic and landscape elements, and Albert Pinkham Ryder for his brooding expressionism achieved through dense application of paint. I learned from Joan Miró and from the color field painters—particularly Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski—how to make paintings that were large and ambitious, yet also appeared physically light.2 When I returned to Bennington as a graduate fellow in 1970, one of my undergraduate drawing students, the artist Liz Phillips, opened me up to a world of contemporary sound (Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich), and a world that subverted visual form (Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus), that stretched the way I thought about visual art.

At Bennington, criticism was primarily the formalism taught by Clement Greenberg, although I connected more to the alternative voices of Lawrence Alloway and Eugene Goossen.3 I found Greenberg’s formalism deracinated the work itself, removing the practice of painting from any sense of the world. Artist and viewer alike were to consider a painting as an autonomous object, outside of its psychological, social, and economic context. This resulted in a binary approach—painterly vs. linear, figure vs. ground, the split between form and content—which was not only restrictive, but also insidious, as it left room for an aggressive assertion of a favored look and style.4

For me, interesting work doesn't have that kind of rigidity—figure isn’t necessarily on top of ground; absence and presence can change places—and the work is also linked to how we relate to people and how we communicate.5 How I live informs how I make all my work.6 It asserts the existence of the world at large, and somehow enables that world to enter in the work.7

By the early 1980s, I had become interested in expressing force and aggression by foregrounding the material qualities of paint.8 I’d been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983, and it was there I realized how important painting was to me—not just art, but specifically painting. I had taken only red, yellow, and blue paint with me, and resumed working in oils, moving the paint around with a small brush. When I returned to New York, the gallerist and critic Klaus Kertess introduced me to Joan Mitchell. She suggested I needed a bigger brush, and as I started to work larger, the paint became heavier and thicker. In hindsight, I can see I was teaching myself how to make the paintings I wanted to make, in a way I never had: dense paintings with a worked quality, the stroke small in relation to the whole.9

Technical aspects of Willem de Kooning’s work from the 1950’s served as a model, and I became increasingly involved in the phenomenology of figuration. My canvases captured the drama of nascent, almost-recognizable forms struggling to come into being, only to recede back into abstraction. Philip Guston’s work from the late 1950s to early 1960s was a source of inspiration, as was Alberto Giacometti’s painting and sculpture.10 Joan continued to offer me friendship, advice, and encouragement through the late 1980s, and invited me to visit her in France.11 There, the region's Romanesque architecture further broadened my view of what painting could be. Monumental structures that position the human subject in relation to the cosmos became an important consideration for me. Sites like the Acropolis, El Alcázar de Cordoba, Moissac, and St. Severin gave me a sense of art as something vast while remaining in touch with the fundamental human impulse to navigate the world in search of physical, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment.

During the 1980s, painting came under attack from postmodern critics for being conservative and outmoded. By the 1990s, feminist circles had further discredited abstract painting as a bastion of male privilege. Yet I reaffirmed my commitment to this powerful tradition as a viable form of expression for myself and others. I believe the act of painting grows out of older forms of visual expression connected to the realm of the spirit. It connotes a belief in the value of individual, personal, subjective experience that honors and perpetuates the most basic of humanist values. Any assertion of a transcendent sublime by American modernist painters has long been in retreat, yet painting still redeems the possibilities of the human imagination.

In the ’90s, my approach became more resolutely one of inclusiveness—in visuality, and in my use of materials. I felt that the standard painting studio materials—pristine tubes of oil paint, appropriate mediums, and solvents—were not enough to re-create in my work the sensual experience of living. Seeing women and men becoming sick and dying on the streets of New York and other American cities, I felt that I was witnessing the decay of our society—of any idea of a society. I wanted to make paintings that would study and grapple with uncontrollable forces and the messiness of the human environment, rather than remain within the safety of the minimal or the limitations of the pure. Disorder, irresolution, unfinished space— these aspects of nature and the uncontrolled side effects of our culture's material abundance are horrible and fascinating. There is a raw truth in these things that has led me toward an art that is opulent and gritty, inviting conflict.

Between 1991 and 1992, I was working out of two studios—one in Chicago, one in New York—and the deal in Chicago was that the studio floor had to be kept clean. At the end of my time there, I had a show coming up in New York, so in order to have as much as possible to work with, I packed up the drop cloths I’d used in Chicago and sent them to New York, where I began painting on them. Working on such base and trampled surfaces was a challenge, but the process opened up possibilities. Eventually, the drop cloths became paintings.

I also began to incorporate other materials: elements from the earth, crushed graphite, copper, marble dust, aluminum, iron oxide, and mundane urban elements including scraps, trash, and studio debris. My interest in heterogeneity—rather than formal unity—expanded. I relied on pours and chemical processes, such as the oxidation of copper, to produce a series of contrasts between areas of luminous color and bleak dullness. I then intervened with some of the pours to make them less continuous and graceful. At times I initiated new chemical processes that affected portions of the canvas at different rates and in starts and stops. Some of these works possess a certain gritty beauty; many are decidedly unpretty.

In the mid ’90s, I began working on developing new marking systems that I applied to found objects, mostly exposed X-ray films taken of those who had died of AIDS. I intervened on the X-rays with chemicals and color, at times to transform the image of the diseased parts, at times as an intuitive response to them. I consider these Altered X-Rays to be elegies for the dead as they lament the loss of human touch, while my transformations act as gestures that seek to restore that touch, knowing full well that’s impossible. I also began to draw and photograph my immediate surroundings as a form of visual note-taking, attempting to ground myself in places and cultures. These, like the X-rays, directly and spontaneously record responses to my lived experience. They annotate and comment upon places and events in my life so as to affirm my quotidian existence—aspects of my daily life that I would otherwise surely forget or neglect.

By the end of the ’90s, these ancillary bodies of work fed back into my paintings, allowing elements of contingency, flux, and indeterminacy to inform all of my practice.12 I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make the sort of paintings in which touch was more evident, an art with a greater emotive and psychological resonance. Reintroducing brushwork as surrogate for my touch made my work more reliant on emotive and psychological force.13 I also started removing the virtuosic from my painting, relentlessly working and reworking the surfaces of my small paintings with brush and palette knife. Some of those small paintings became, for me, the embodiment of destructive violence, harnessed and transformed by the act of painting. The larger, more open paintings referred frequently to uncharted spaces such as those one finds between airports and cities—neither industrial nor urban or suburban, only dead zones of topography. I link this with the concept of useless, “wasted” time. Both allow for more human and perhaps more humane ways of feeling and being.14

It’s said that in Eastern art, the viewer has to go into the painting. And while I’m not an Eastern artist, I do try to make art that offers a space in which to roam around and maybe even get lost. Many of my paintings don’t have a lot of obvious drama, but if you become involved in them, they may.15

I’ve also long been interested in our daily sensory visual experience, and how we convert the uncertainties of first sight into coherent, generalized views that make sense of the world. I attempt to affirm the disjuncture inherent in that moment when things are first glimpsed, before an image coheres.16

In many of the paintings of the 2000s, I initiated intensely purposeful lines and shapes on a background of very beautiful, lush skeins and pours of paint. I then deliberately and messily erased them. The resulting palimpsest became the final work. Many of the drawn and painted lines and shapes were derived from projecting earlier paintings of my own, and those of others I admire, onto the pours I had made. I then traced their outlines with charcoal and paint. My intent was to foreground an oscillation between uncertainty and surety, fastness and slowness, to make them the form and substance of the finished work. A history of my discards and overrides remained visible. An image emerged not unlike multiple exposures on a single plate of film.17

Often these paintings developed over many years. I might consciously eradicate opulent, seemingly natural, skeins and pours of paint by scribbling over them with charcoal and pastel, then messily erasing and blurring some of that scribbling. Or I would use the charcoal as a tool to move paint, in order to cut any sense of ease of handling. Such methods reflect my view that nothing is purely natural nor unmitigatedly beautiful, nor ever still or final or closed; that there is never one place, nor one way of being. I also sensed during this period that existence in this new century would be increasingly difficult and hard-won, and I wanted that to filter into my work.18

In 2007, after the loft in which I’d lived and worked for more than thirty years received a vacate order, I began a new body of work I called Nomads. They were my attempt to place myself in a world in which I had lost my place, when I had no permanent home or studio. In the borrowed studio of a friend, I began cutting wood veneer that was on hand, attempting to follow the shapes and forms of Jean Prouvé, the self-taught architect and designer who made structures and furniture for nomadic existences. In doing this, I found unexpected curves and moves. It seemed as if his forms detoured from the expectations they set—as if they were animated—causing me to discard my initial expectations of what a form might have signaled. After gluing the shapes that I cut onto stretched linen, I deployed both oil- and water-based paints to make marks and forms that are antithetical to those shapes. These individual marks often have a solitary bent. I painted onto other shapes, at times integrating them into a larger whole, at other times attempting to eradicate them. The resulting slippages and discrepancies prompted me to include more disparate elements in the rest of my painting. To me, the Nomads would be seen best in liminal spaces, at irregular intervals: on a wall of a staircase opposite an elevator; on the exterior wall of an exhibition gallery; on an interior column. Spaces like these constitute way stations for the works, and such placements lend to consideration of the uncertain and contingent place we have in the world.19

By the 2010s, I was grouping my paintings into separate categories that included Drawings, Curtains, and Tablets. Curtains generally referred to hiding and revealing, relying on the sense of “behind” and “in front of,” nodding to my longtime interest in art expressing the underside of life. Drawings were so-called because someone once said that I wasn’t really making paintings, that my paintings were really big drawings.20

The Tablets paintings were based on the story behind the deciphering of the Minoan Linear B script and some of the elements of script itself: its syllabary, logograms, and pictograms. These were done on paper and linen with water-based paint, raw pigment (evoking clay tablets and archaeological excavation), and, at times, oil. During their making, meaning was displaced by a shift to immaterial information, meant to parallel the attempts at the actual deciphering of Linear B script. All these paintings continued to develop out of acts and erasures, with a new image constructed through form and its displacement.21 Then, in the fall of 2014, I shifted my practice toward an emphasis on what might be considered conventionally beautiful color.22 The following year, I began a series of Meanders, largely on paper but with a few paintings as well.23

The pandemic of 2020 affected my life in general, and my work as an artist in particular. Support for Black Lives Matter grew and became increasingly diverse, yet police killings of Black people continued unchecked. Peaceful demonstrations were increasingly met with hostility and overt violence, and I became even more alienated from American culture, particularly the legal system.

My main studio helper left New York in the spring, and when the pandemic hit hardest, I asked the others to stay home. I began doing the preparation myself, one at a time, feeling real pressure to make something beautiful in the face of the criminally unnecessary deaths and degradation of many. Doing the preparation was settling, and it was a way of connecting to the future painting.24 I wanted to return to my own beginnings as a painter—my love of making things with my hands. So I started making work in my living room, revisiting small paintings and drawings from various periods of my life that I had left unfinished and then abandoned.

The works I made in the spring of 2020 had that sense of urgency. Because I began them at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between life and death, between life and the possibility of an afterlife, and between the past and a radically uncertain future. In some of them I silkscreened parts onto the linen, then washed off the ink while it was wet. It’s not as if there are no traces or signs of the hand on them, but they still look like they were brought in from outer space.25

I now approach each day with an anything can happen mentality. Usually, I have a rough idea or a stance or an attitude that I want my painting to take, or a position that I want my work to have. I have continued working on paintings one at a time, often printing the basic structure of earlier works onto primed linen, then working back into that printed armature directly, introducing conflicting scenarios. I do have a notion of what I want my current work to be, how I want it to present itself. I want to make a painting that is non-finite, ambiguous but at the same time rather serious and non-ironic, a painting one might not notice as a painting. One might walk by it as one does a wall or an unremarkable tree, a method of turning failure into a compelling act.26

I remain committed to the tradition and medium of painting. Through marks on canvas, I convey my experience of the world in all its nuanced complexity. Painting, from the Renaissance on, has remained the most rigorous, durable, and prestigious form of visual expression in Western culture. In the twenty-first century, painting has also become a contradiction to, and form of resistance against, an information age based on digital technology. It demands a meditative calm and deliberate slowness of apprehension that runs counter to the speed and logic of contemporary electronic media. It fosters a way of seeing that rewards stillness and slowness and requires a prolonged, meditative engagement. It has the capability of engaging us fully—not just our minds, but our bodies and hearts. It solicits and nourishes our psychological and spiritual well-being.

Painting can change the world.27

—Cora Cohen, 2023

Notes

1. Cora Cohen, “VSC_talk_2009,” lecture notes used in various versions from 2009–2016. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-13.html.

2. Cora Cohen, “Nov_25Materials,” 2010. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-12.html.

3. Cohen, “VSC_talk_2009.”

4. Cora Cohen, “Greenberg’s_Formalism,” 2015. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-4.html

5. Cora Cohen, “2012 Lecture Notes,” 2012. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-8.html

6. Cora Cohen, “Cohen, Cora (2011)”, 2011. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-10.html

7. Cora Cohen, “SJ_CC_GD_Interview,” 2013. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-6.html

8. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

9. Cora Cohen, in Barry Schwabsky and Cora Cohen, “A Conversation,” 1996. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-15.html

10. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

11. Cora Cohen, “Narrative_long,” 2011. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-11.html

12. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

13. Cohen, “Narrative_long.”

14. Cohen, “Nov_25Materials.”

15. Cora Cohen, in Cora Cohen and Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.” See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-1.html.

16. Cora Cohen, “In daily life we convert the uncertainties of initial seeing,” 2012. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-9.html.

17. Cora Cohen, “Artist’s Statement: George,” 2002. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-14.html.

18. Cohen, “VSC_talk_2009.”

19. Cora Cohen, “Nomads,” 2015. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/by-2.html.

20. Cora Cohen, “SAIC_2016,” 2016. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-3.html.

21. Cora Cohen, “The paintings that I’m working on now,” 2013. See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-7.html.

22. Cohen, “SAIC_2016.”

23. Ed.: Information about the series has been added to Cohen’s original statement for clarity and continuity.

24. Cora Cohen, “Now,” 2022.See the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/now.html.

25. Cohen, in Cohen and Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

26. Cohen, “Now.”

27. Cohen, “Artist’s Statement: George.”

Texts: Press