Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2020 - Student interview - 07. Sama Padmini Cooper

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SAMA COOPER: Hi. My name's Sama Cooper, and I studied at Katoomba High in NSW. Well, my inspiration for my work, it was always - my art's always been based around like emotion and feeling, and connecting with the actual artwork instead of like a concept or an idea. I've always wanted my work to like not necessarily mean anything, or address an issue, but like to just like sit and look at it and kind of forget about everything else.

With my body of work, I wanted to just do portraits of people, that like no one has to know them or anything. But, like you look at it, and you know what they're feeling. You can kind of connect with them. It's like a very basic thing. And, I called it 'Sonder,' because it means like the realisation that everyone has a life just as complex as your own. But, no one actually considers that, ever.

Well, I started out with like just the idea of wanting to draw people. Because that's mostly what I like doing. Because I didn't want to think about the concept yet. Because I've never really had conceptual work when I've done art.

I came up with the idea of just, like, just people. So, I started to draw this kind of repetitive phase. It was just one image, but it was like layered, so it was like probably like 12 photos. But, they were like in rainbow colours. And, then someone suggested to me, 'oh, it looks like when you have like a changing emotion, or a trail of thought, or something like that.' And so, that kind of sparked the idea of basing my idea around emotion, and people, and whatever else.

So, I wanted to do drawing at first, because that's one of my strong points. The painting was a bit harder. And, then I came on to ink. And, that was really easy for me. And, it just kind of came together, more how I wanted it.

It's kind of hard to get it right first go. Because you can't rub it out, or you can't redo it or anything. So, it has to be perfect first go of how you want. I started with a bunch of photos from people. And, I'd either make them too dark, or too light, or the proportions would be off, or something like that. And, I just had to restart the whole thing.

So, that happened 3 or 4 times. So, I had to restart again. Or, just like get a completely different photo, because it wasn't working out for me. I'd have to take my own photos. And usually, I'd run out a lot of photos that I actually wanted to do. Because if I didn't want to do the photo, it just wasn't going to be a good art work.

Through my body of work, it took me like quite a long time, like a couple of months. So, it was like one thing to do over a long period of time, like every day at school. And, I realised having big projects to do had more of an impact on me, and it had more value to me.

In my artist statement, I mentioned John William Waterhouse and a lot of Renaissance period artists, because a lot of their stuff is quite romanticised and emotive. And, the painting's always focused around people, and their expressions, and how they're focused on things around them, and how they're interacting with the world. Just by looking at their face, you can see what they're feeling and their emotions. So, I wanted to reflect that in my piece.

With my art, I've always noticed that it's not addressing an issue, or connected to something that people really consider or think about in the world, like politics, or climate change and all that kind of stuff. And so, I've realised, by looking at my work, that because I want art to mean something and have an impact on people, so I've always just focused on what things mean to me. And what people should be worrying about is just kind of quite different, bigger issues and bigger things, so that's had an impact on me.