ART BY BOBBY COOPER

Bobby Cooper is always off on yet another adventure. He has just returned from another visit to the Amazon.

He lived in a tribe in the Amazon for ten years, and walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He’s lived in caves and other holes in the wall for years. He has walked an innumerable amount of kilometers with a backpack and 50 dollars in his wallet in foreign countries, and almost died twice, contracting hepatitis, dysentery, and some other illnesses along the way. He’s been shot and stabbed, and robbed, which is a small part of the adventure, too. He prefers the 4th World (the world where indigenous peoples live) as his home most of the time, either in the jungle with his native kids or, meeting new cultures.

Bobby lives his artwork and never loses contact with it. At age 54, he’s tasted the cold sky and the hot stars, and reached inside himself to take lonely walks along the shores of his confusions and pains, delights and loves. That way we unfold, to wake up to being a Human that is recognizing its Being Part: that which is covered by too much extreme and imbalance in the world, by an industrial civilization choking on itself.

He uses black paper with colored pencil. The black paper entertains an opposite to the common white paper. It’s like bringing a light into the dark, rather than shadow into the light. The black paper is a mysterious cave, a haunted house, a killer clown under the bed, a flower discovered while walking at night, or a thick arm of stars in the sky.

His work is a huge mix of experiences and struggles, mostly internal, with the loving influence of the struggles and lifeways of indigenous peoples, and that of his children and his father specifically.

You can see more of his art HERE