With her most recent series, “Viscera”, exhibiting this weekend at La Luz De Jesus gallery in Los Angeles, JAW Cooper creates intricately detailed mixed media paintings that stir up a sense of adventure and wonder. Rendering figures with graceful, technical lines and vivid, enchanting color, Cooper’s dreamy illustrations show people an imaginary archaic culture that seems foreign, but still familiar. Surrounding the figures are luscious worlds filled with exotic animals and luscious plant life than seem to live on the outside of the page. The pieces hint at a relationship between the people and nature, however they don’t follow a set theme that unites the series. They are more so similar in tone, which is a departure from Cooper’s previous collections of work. “With each piece I had a rough idea starting out what I wanted but I let the painting go where it wanted in the process…” she says. In “Viscera”, Cooper explores the more spontaneous side of her work. “…I wanted to bring a little bit more of that rawness, the beauty that I see in the initial works, the rough stuff in sketches, into the finished work.” Get a preview of JAW Cooper’s new works in “Visera”, opening at LA Luz de Jesus gallery on August 8th, below.
The lush, dreamlike illustrations of 
We can only imagine what early explorers venturing off into the new world must have felt. Medieval maps and encyclopedic bestiaries give us some idea of the strange lands they expected to encounter, inhabited by mysterious figures and loathsome, fictitious beasts. Montreal, Canada based painter 
French illustrator and designer 
Finnish artist