Carol Pepper Cooper our LongReach Artist for June

My goal is to make images which allow the viewer to wander within the world it presents, or wonder about it or, hopefully, both.

When I started creating the painting shown here, I didn't know where it would go. As I entered a dialogue with the canvas, I recognized in the painting something I had seen shortly before I had started it, and which to this day has haunted me -- a poem whose longing for a better world echoes my own:

Let a new earth rise.
Let another world be born.
Let bloody peace be written in the sky.
Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.
 ------  Margaret Walker

This, I recognized, is what the canvas and I had given birth to.