The Hudson River Valley's Premier Artist Collective
CAROL PEPPER-COOPER- Oils & Pastel
When I first began drawing, I tried to make my images as "realistic" as I knew how. Gradually, however, I moved towards trying to express how I felt about what I was
seeing. Although still referential, my work became increasingly more expressionist, so that by the time I received my MFA I had been labeled an "Figurative Expressionist." Over the years my works became more and more abstract until I was creating "non objective" work. In the last few years, however, while still working non-objectively, I have also begun to make pieces which are more expressive of my dismay and despair about the environmental state of our planet and the socio/political malaise of my country. Regardless of how my individual works may be labeled, what unites them all is the aim to draw the viewer into the mystery of what is felt--but not seen.
In the 65 years since graduating from Radcliffe College, Carol has earned the MFA from Pratt institute, established an art department in a Brooklyn elementary school, served as a college Dean, run a college tutoring program in which she taught psychology, created more than a dozen sets for 3 community theaters, plus designs for three 7-foot stained glass windows installed in Kingston's Temple Emanuel in 2005. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Hudson Valley, in Westchester, in NYC, Germany and Italy. She has received numerous awards including, in 2014, the Arts Society of Kingston's Distinguished Artist of the Year; in 2017, its "ASKAR," and in 2015 the Woodstock Artists' Association and Museum's Towbin Award for "Art Work of Exceptional Merit in Our Region." Her work is included in the permanent collections of the University of Illinois, Pratt Institute, Israel's Hebrew University. and in private collections across the U.S.
