Artworks by Bob Cooper

All my life I’ve had to create art. For me it’s not a choice, I have always been an artist.

It’s an addiction.

Since I was a young boy I’ve always drawn pictures, when I’m not creating I feel something missing, call it a pang, like hunger.

After school I went to Bretton Hall College to study Fine Art Sculpture. Living in the middle of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park it was impossible not to be influenced by the artwork that surrounded me. I spent three years experimenting with various disciplines and developing my artistic ideals and practice. It was a very happy time for me and I still feel the effects on my artwork from those years.

Like many graduates I came back to the real world with a resounding bump. I had no job, no money and no idea what I wanted to do with myself. I spent many years figure out how I could I take this artistic skill and turn it into a way of life. In the meantime I took shitty jobs to pay the rent while my mind wilted in boredom. I had to expel this frustration in the only way I knew, through my art. I started experimenting with repetition, making copies of photographs, then copies of the copies and so on. From this came my first series of real artwork –0101 – a series of digital prints that I then exhibited in The Biscuit Factory in Newcastle Upon Tyne in 2004.

I was hooked.

Following 0101 I have created many more series of works. After each series I take a step back and re-evaluate my artwork. Following my moonscapes I realised that all my work to date revolves around repetition, and I wandered why this was.

I realised that all our lives are stuck on repeat.

Every day we do the same things, we eat, we wash, we go to work, we sleep. The Earth goes through seasons and every year we circle the sun, every 230 million years the solar system circles the Milky Way. We have elections every five years, we wage the same wars, and it never ends. From the most mundane to the most epic events they all repeat. Repetition is integral to our lives, again and again and again, on and on and on.