Cora Cohen: Painter of the Lost and Found

To describe the work of Cora Cohen is to describe the unfathomable. That is the space in which she made her work. As a painter, she leads us through a lost land with the goal of being whole again in the space of the found.

Cohen’s work embodies some empirical questions about nature—what is it? how is it accessed? and what does it create? Her painting practice is bound in the mystery and glory of achieving these understandings time and again. In her process, she challenges us to believe in what we are seeing. We must engage in her skill and tenacity as a painter to circumvent the realm of disbelief that intensifies in the material effects of her work. In turn, Cohen wants to project an idea of beauty that can be found in the most common of marks and in the matter-of-fact remains of material spread across a canvas.

Over the many years of her career, Cohen taught herself how to make marks that become the aura of sky and cosmos. As I see it, invention in her drawing and, additionally, in her Altered X-Rays, helped her to supersede the plasticity of paint as “the ground” to make paintings that materially become akin to air.

The discourse of nature is a discourse of power where the constellations of power determine the construction of nature.—Johannes Dingler¹

Cohen is strident in the way that she poses her questions of nature via chance.

In Cohen’s hands, material becomes the way of understanding her openness to nature through chance. In varying and perfect ways, chance comes to life in her work through the manner in which she mixes materials. In specific drawings, one can see skins of transparent colored liquid wash over more densely matted areas of paint, to activate the tension of tactility on the paper surface.

She is also conveying an understanding of nature in her examinations of mark-making through opacity and transparency, with movements between the representation of the mark as line and/or mass, and through the centering and de-centering of the marks as different colors within a drawing space.

In the age of postmodernism and its aftermath, 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. —Cora Cohen²

Cohen engages structure as hierarchical in her drawings and yet she is denying this hierarchy in the constant rearrangement of these elements as space. Any ordering that exists in the work comes from the many bridges created between areas where an abrupt change of color or mark has occurred to make the space new again with increasing activation and energy.

There is a great awareness of space in her drawings. You can feel its weight in her hands even when nothing appears to exist within it, and this is at the center of the understanding she shares.

In her work there is no such thing as “negative” or “positive” space—for Cohen, it is all one thing. This is where the contest begins as she brings unassailable forces together to keep them suspended in a dance of material as liquidity and mark. She brings together these elements that are bound in technical, historical, and aesthetic terminologies, and in her hands this all becomes the nameless, the unfathomable.

Cohen makes spaces that defy definition and containment. Her drawings and paintings remain active in the pure force she instills within them. And this force exists in the present as embodiment in her struggle to be found.

She brings a voice to the Other in works that draw from a reservoir of experience through her identity as a woman. She understands the peripheral context of her being in history—in painting’s history.

The title of her painting Terrains Vagues, she once explained, “is an actual term used to refer to those uncharted spaces one finds between airports and cities. These spaces are neither industrial, urban, nor suburban, but rather constitute the dead zones of European topography.”³ But couldn’t “terrains vagues” also double as the vagina, hence a metaphor for the space of the neglected female body and the unexplored vessel that is lost in nature and history within the world? Cohen’s actions and being as a painter are the weapons against this positioning.

A terrain vague, she wrote, “is an oasis of neglect, with no purpose, and may be linked with useless, ‘wasted’ time. Uncharted space and ‘wasted’ time are vital. They permit us more human and perhaps then more humane ways of feeling and being.”⁴

Working through material conundrums, Cohen brings the obscured and confounding mysteries of painting to light. She constructs arguments in her painting process through the setting up of layered fields as propositions of visual contradictions that eventually resolve themselves as they do in great paintings—through the coexistence of difference. As such, she can be seen as a postmodernist working to extend the paradigms of modernity, all the while acknowledging the presence of the Other in her process.

By the mid-1990s, I had become proficient in the full range of techniques I had been using for thirty years. Also, I had begun working on developing new marking systems applied to found objects, mostly exposed x-ray films. In addition, I began to make new kinds of drawings and to photograph my immediate surroundings as a form of visual notetaking. These records of the surface of things may offer insights, other than those of first sight.—Cora Cohen⁵

Cohen’s drawings have the significance of an occurrence or an event. Something is always happening in them, whether it be a situation or a condition.

The movement of her mark creates an implication of transformation or change within the spaces she worked through. There is the consideration of layered marks and material that interplay within her drawings.

With close examination one can identify a shift over time in her drawings by the way that Cohen addresses the space of the paper. Drawings from the late 1960s through the 1970s appear as more centered in their compositional makeup, with the layering starting from the center or referring to it within the process of their making. In later drawings, there are returns to the central thematic, but increasingly there is more off-balance within the compositions as the materials dance in a way where the space of inactivity has as much weight and pull as the more active and worked areas of her drawings.

A question arises in the drawings as to whether one is to consider them as one final space or a gathering of many varied spaces held together within the frame of the paper support. Could she be manifesting multiple worlds into one, or was there a space and then another reflecting alongside each other within her drawings? Even with the compositional changes in her use of space, this aspect of combining varied planar elements remains essential throughout her drawing practice.

Figural references sometimes play a note in Cohen’s drawings through groupings of marks that either cluster or stand alone in the space to connote a small or larger gathering of potential human beings. In other instances, the marks accumulate to look like scratching on a surface in the attempt to claw through it. Additionally, vestiges of landscape, grand or private, appear in the drawings, seemingly ready in their display for exploration by those willing and unafraid to seek knowledge.

Her use of watercolor and the compositions made with it most effectively call into mind the legacy of Arshile Gorky and the liquidity he utilized, which subsequently enabled Jackson Pollock to make his great escape from the easel. The widespread dispersion of watercolor along with Flashe and inks in her paper works allowed for a deep-seated transparence of space. This in turn helped the space to open itself to the activity of mark and movement circulating all around.

In our time, painting has become a contradiction to and form of resistance against an information age based on digital technology. —Cora Cohen⁶

Cohen’s process showed great openness and generosity as she skillfully moved through a cacophony of visual information and ephemera that was her material toward a place of grounding.

She conveyed the majestic in drawings and paintings that seem materially matter-of-fact but added up to more than what you see. And she did this her way, which is the key.

Cohen worked past the canons of painting’s history to find varied conclusions under her own terms. Her practice from the beginning was a defiance of the preset that women do not have a voice in Western painting. Cohen was determined to look inward with clear understanding of the historic underpinnings within the realm from which she wished to speak.

The enhanced use of watercolor in her drawings broke through form and matter to allow for the overwhelming nature of space to take over. Similar to Carolee Schneemann, Cohen’s body, as biological and the physiological, was as much a tool as were her materials in the making of her work. This interplay with matter made for artworks that defied the containment of language.

In her process, Cohen remakes the idea of what a painting can be and where it begins. This expressly is her contribution to the idea of freedom found through painting. This is not a given, but rather it was hard won.

Painting fosters a way of seeing that rewards stillness and slowness. A prolonged, meditative engagement is required.—Cora Cohen⁷

Cohen’s drawing practice was her plan of action and invention.

Her paintings and drawings garner intense looking and wonder as one approaches the great complexity of the materials at play. As such, the obscure became clear in her hands, and in her own way she took hold of this with immense mastery, grace, and control.

Notes

^1. Johannes Dingler, abstract for “The discursive nature of nature: Towards a post-modern concept of nature,” Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 7 no. 3 (2005): 209–25. Available at Taylor & Francis online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15239080500339679#:~:text=According%20to%20post-modern%20discourse,place%20within%20a%20discursive%20framework.

^2. Cora Cohen, “Artist’s Statement, George” 2002. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-14.html

^3. Ibid.

^4. Ibid.

^5. Ibid.

^6. Ibid.

^7. Ibid.