Radio Maine Episode #88: Cooper Dragonette
November 5, 2022
Known for his plein air landscapes, artist Cooper Dragonette has spent recent months experimenting with a different reality: that of time past. His newer pieces draw upon his unique background as an teacher and instructor, exploring Maine’s remote outer islands with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School. Considering this contrast of approaches–integrating one’s self and memories into one’s work, rather than focusing solely on the present moment–provides an opportunity for reflection on the nature of being human, and how art is uniquely positioned to capture this experience. Please join our conversation with Cooper Dragonette on this episode of Radio Maine with Dr. Lisa Belisle.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to, or watching, Radio Maine. Today, I have with me, artist Cooper Dragonette. Thanks for being here.
Cooper Dragonette:
Good to be with you.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
And this is the second time that you've joined me here in the studio. So you're obviously an experienced entertainer when it comes to this space.
Cooper Dragonette:
Well, I'll try to be, yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Yes. Which goes along with the work you used to do with the children you used to teach.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes, there's definitely a level of entertainment and keeping people's attention, for a little while anyway. Until their eyes started to glaze over and you realized you had to step off the stage and let them get to work.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Yes, that's true. You're actually particularly good at giving artists remarks. For example, I know you have a show up at the Portland Art Gallery and you were quite poised giving your remarks to the audience. You seem to have no problems with interacting with the group.
Cooper Dragonette:
I was pretty nervous about that. I think it's interesting because I did once teach in front of a classroom and I taught Outward Bound courses way back and did a lot of public speaking. I think you just have to get used to public speaking in that situation. It's just a daily thing. But because I hadn't done it for so long, I was really anxious about it the whole week leading up to the art opening on Thursday night. I was sweating before I went up to speak that night.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Do you think if you had been in that mode, and you had been doing public speaking, and it was something that recently you had been practicing at, that it would've been any different for you?
Cooper Dragonette:
Maybe, and maybe you understand this from your role as well. It's like that nervous energy is sometimes really good and when it's not there, it's like, “what am I, where is it? What am I going to do?” And then, there's nervous energy that sort of paralyzes you. We did a great workshop at the gallery with Dietlind Vander Schaaf and she talked about that nervousness and that it is just energy. And I do try to remember that. It really rang true for me. But yes, public speaking is different. It's really different. But it was fun. It's always fun to make a group of people in a room laugh. That's good. It feels like you're off to a good start.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
It beats the alternative. Right?
Cooper Dragonette:
Right. Yes. Crickets.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Or, making them cry.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. Or they leave.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Yes. Right. That's even worse.
You're bringing up something I think is not that unusual for many people who are in the art field. Which is that you're asked to interface with the public, and do it in kind of a big way, every so often. And that's not always comfortable for people.
Cooper Dragonette:
Right. It's a pretty solo pursuit, definitely for myself anyway. It's very quiet and very solitary. Sometimes I'll be listening to a podcast or music but you're definitely locked in with your own thoughts and decision making process. And then at some point in the day, you’ve got to put down your brushes and step back into the rest of the world. And that takes a little adjusting. But the day to day is pretty solitary and I love that about it. I love the quiet and the focus that you get just from being alone with a painting, or a couple of paintings, in the studio or working plein air. I feel pretty fortunate to have that as part of my regular daily routine.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
I remember when I was doing a lot of writing, and not as much doctoring, and the emergence, it was like being a sea monster, rising up out of the depths of the ocean to actually interface with human beings on the planet. It was that very weird feeling that, “Oh, I actually have to use my mouth to form words to talk with people.”
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. I often don't answer the phone during that space - which is a good and a bad thing. I guess I look to see who's calling but I don't want to break the spell. And so stepping out of it for any reason, it takes a while to get back into that groove. You're just in the zone. You get into the zone and you don't want to step out of it because things are going well. I find listening to music or listening to a podcast you can't do it with writing, at least I couldn't, maybe music, but especially listening to a good podcast where somebody's talking about an interesting subject seems to take away some element of the critical part of painting. Because every brushstroke is making a decision. Every color choice is a decision and it's so easy to start beating yourself up about it.
Cooper Dragonette:
And it's easy to think it's going in the wrong direction. And there's something about having that other voice in your ear while you're listening to somebody else speak. I don't know, it seems like that has been very helpful for me in just staying out of the weeds and feeling like the painting is heading in a good direction and I'm not kicking myself the whole way through it. So yes, that's always an interesting process to have that going at the same time. I almost purposely now try to get something going to listen to when I start painting.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
That's so fascinating because I'm envisioning Cooper's neurons that you're babysitting somehow. The critical neurons on this side. They're occupied. It's like the children. You've sent the children off to Sunday school and they're gonna go do their thing and then you're going to be able to do your other thing or on the other side of your brain.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes, I mean, you're just reminding me that sometimes if you walked by my studio, you'd think, why is that man dancing while he's painting? But if there's a really good tune playing or an album, it all sort of seems to work together. The painting process with good music becomes fun for sure. But I think it becomes fun because I've turned off that critical part of my brain saying, “This is terrible, this is awful, you should put this in the garbage start over.” That seems to have been tamped down by whatever I'm listening to.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
I mean, that's such a funny thing that I think that many people who try to have more than one existence often struggle with. And I know that for me, I can do an excellent job incorporating creativity into my day to day life as a doctor and as a healthcare person. But it's very hard to then move back into the creative space and kind of free things up because you're called to do more analysis on one side. And it's hard to leave that analysis behind if you're not wanting to any longer.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Does that make sense?
Cooper Dragonette:
That seems to be a right brain left brain sort of process. I don't know, I wonder what side of the brain fun lives on.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
The dancing that you're describing.
Cooper Dragonette:
Dancing and music, and that all seems to be just fun. Recently in the studio I found basically my old college stereo. And usually when I'm listening to music, I am listening to it on a set of headphones. So it's quiet. Nobody upstairs can hear music in my head. But I found this old stereo I had in college and I was like, Oh, I wonder if this still works. So I hooked it up, I got it all set up in the studio. I was adamant that it could not take me any longer than 10 minutes if I can't find all the wires and I'll just put it in the car and take it to the swap shop. But I found everything and I found a way to hook the iPhone to it. I turned it on and it worked, it was great. And it was like, Oh, this is fun! Big volume. It's really fun. So I turned it really far up, really far, and I got to the end of the first song and I thought, that beat that's coming through the speakers doesn’t match the song. And I kind of kept looking around at the stereo going, what's the matter? And then I realized there's a man standing at the back door pounding on the door telling me to turn it down. My backyard neighbor. Whoops. And I just told him, you caught a 50 year old man in an 18 year old moment. It's never gonna happen again. So I've gone back to the headphones.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Yes. And ultimately your neighbor was okay with that?
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. I think he realized it wasn’t my 14 year old son, it was a fairly responsible adult that was trying out his old college days stereo.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
I mean, that is honestly something I actually kind of miss, that ability to just turn things up and have it be so loud that you can just be and forget everything.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. You're in it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
In it. Yes. Right. Because I think that's the other thing about being an adult is that you have to pay the mortgage and you have to make sure your kids get to school. There's just a set of things that you just have to get done. That's just the nature of that. But something that can bring you back to that pounding beat. That's not your neighbor.
Cooper Dragonette:
No. And I think that in some ways that works in what I do because maybe you get to step away from all those things. And I enjoy that. I don't have the responsibilities that we all do while I'm working. And there's some element of, it's definitely work but it is fun. I do like it. I enjoy going to the studio or setting up outdoors someplace to paint. I took a workshop years ago and somebody said, well, if you're having fun, you're doing it wrong. Referring to painting. And I thought, yes, it is hard. There's something about it that's difficult and you struggle through it. Maybe now at this point, I've learned enough about the process that I kind of know what's gonna happen. Or if it doesn't start off on the right foot, you just know it's not gonna. It's a struggle to get to the end, or you didn't prepare well enough for it. So yes, that business of enjoying the work and then struggling to make a good painting, it's still all a nice place to be at the end of the day. Whether it's the studio or outdoors, it's a nice place to stand for a long time.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
I mean, isn't it strange that this idea that struggle isn't enjoyable? I mean to say that if it's fun, you're not doing it right. Well, but can it be fun to be doing something that's somewhat complicated and maybe not intuitive? Can't the struggle be itself a source of enjoyment?
Cooper Dragonette:
When you've maybe tackled something more difficult than you thought you could handle, or, I think that's probably where the breakthroughs come. If I just kept making the same painting over and over again, I think I'd be bored. I'd still have fun. But I do like the challenge of something. And I often choose stuff and think, can I do that? It'd be going for a run and if I had trained to do a 10K, okay, I could probably do a 10K. But then if I hadn't trained for a marathon, am I really setting myself up for failure because I'm not ready to do that? I don’t know. There's some element of the hard parts of it that can be frustrating and defeating there. There's a lot of paintings in the studio that will never see the light of day, let's put it that way. They didn't go well. And there's probably paintings out there that have paintings underneath them just because they didn't turn out in the direction I thought they were gonna go. So that's just painting. I think it's writing right? Writing is rewriting and that's painting. Painting is just, hopefully you do a lot of that though in a sketchbook or on a small scale so that you basically do all your rough drafts first on paper in pencil. Just quick, easy. And maybe you've worked out a lot of the problems. So when you get to the canvas, it's not that the problems haven't been worked out yet.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
It's good to have that flexibility in the work that you do. Because I think that's actually one of the interesting things about being in a professional job, whether it's being a teacher, whether it's being a doctor, is that you don't have as much latitude to make mistakes. There's not really as much of a sketchbook that you can be like, Oh, oh, sorry about that.
Cooper Dragonette:
I didn't get that one. Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Yes. Oh, sorry. I didn't teach you correctly this whole last year of math, but I guess I'll just work on the next student. Thank you so much.
Cooper Dragonette:
Or yes, the diagnosis was this and I gave you that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Yes, exactly. But I think there is something really important about the ability to experiment and the ability to keep moving forward in a direction.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. I suppose in that sense, you don't have that maybe in other fields, but I always think every painting is just practiced for the next painting. And so you try to take what you've learned from the last painting and bring it into the next painting. And I suppose when people ask me what's my favorite painting, it's usually the one I'm working on right then, or the last one I just made. I think, because I've weeded out all the other mistakes that I see in the other paintings, and maybe I don't yet see the mistakes in the most current painting. But if you look at a body of your own work, I tend to just focus on what's wrong about them, what's missing, what I didn't do well. I just see all the glaring errors but I think that's more of an internal, I could do better or I still have to figure that out. There's still room for improvement. And that's maybe what makes every painting an interesting process. What's going to happen in this painting that I never saw coming? So there's always some other layer of the onion to get to.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
So as we're talking about things that happened that maybe were unexpected, what about the piece that we have in the studio here with us?
Cooper Dragonette:
Today? Well, this painting is really more of a painting from my imagination or my memory than other pieces that I might do on site or paint. I paint from images that I've photographed or drawn. This is an island way down the coast near the Canadian border called Libby Island. It's pretty remote. You're pretty far from shore here. And it was one of those islands that I never saw that often, but it always had this presence even at a distance. Nobody lived on it anymore. The lighthouse was now automated. No trees, just a tall grass covered island. I just love all those outer islands. When I worked for Outward Bound, that was where I wanted to go. I always wanted to go farther out. How far out could we go? We were in little lifeboats, often we had to row them to get to where we were going. And the outer islands were always the most interesting. Either they were barren, unoccupied, preserved, or islands like Matinicus or Monhegan. These island communities that were fairly remote that most of the time those populations dwindled down to just a few hundred people, a couple hundred people in the winters. And the farther down east you went, the fewer people there were on those outer islands. So I just always was drawn to those places when I first learned about the coast of Maine, the remoteness of it. And so this piece here seemed to come together fairly quickly.
I mean, I think I knew how I wanted to compose it, but then I struggled with things like the water and the texture of the rocks in the distance. I know I painted that water in the foreground three or four times. Even after I got it framed I thought I was gonna bring it back home and fix it again. But maybe there was a little time between having dropped it off at the framers and then picking it up again. I thought, oh no, it's okay. It's fine as it is, and I'm not gonna make it any better with the tools I have and the abilities I have since that's as far as I could get with it. And then the other thing about this piece is I don't often paint figures in my paintings. And I usually don't make them fairly prominent. But I like the solitary aspect of this one lobsterman, the island, this house, is it a house or is it just a shed? Is there anybody in it? That's not a dynamic I usually put into paintings, but I did that connection between the island and the lobstermen and this one.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
So when you saw Libby Island, was there actually a lobster boat next to it? Was there a guy in it?
Cooper Dragonette:
No, that's just, again, these are just components of memories. A lobsterman working on the coast way out away from shore down east. It's amazing when you go down east in a sailboat probably even by land once you get past Acadia and Bar Harbor, it's a totally different coastline. It's a different population. It doesn't seem like tourism reaches that far past it. Maybe more so now. It's been a while since I've spent a lot of time down there. But as soon as you got past Acadia, it was rare that we ever saw another sailboat. And so the only people we would see were lobstermen. And they came from towns like Korea or Goldsboro or Jonesport. And those were the only other sort of humans you saw while you were out in those outer islands. It seemed like that was their backyard and you were just traveling through it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Are you telling yourself as you're creating your pieces, are you telling yourself a story? I know that you do a lot of work that's outside and landscape oriented, so yes, that's a story of a sort. Right? But this seems different.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. I feel like my work is, I don’t know if it's taking a turn or it's just on a tangent right now, but painting plein air often feels like I'm recording that moment when I'm there. And there's some element of it feeling a little bit like painting a postcard. And one of the things we talked about recently at the gallery was the idea of memory of missing things. So I think the driver of a lot of my work, at least in this latest body of work, is that idea of missing things in memory. I just don't see these things anymore in my day to day. But they were magical when I did see them. They really resonated with me.
Cooper Dragonette:
I always talk about this sunset that I saw on Matinicus island one night when we were working with Outward Bound, and it's still the best sunset I will ever see. I've just given up looking for a better sunset. It was the best. And there were a lot of moments when you were up early or up late where you saw stuff that just you had to be there more or less. And so moments like this, maybe I didn't see this moment exactly, but there were just a lot of times when we'd be up at sunrise or still sailing after the sun had gone down and you really felt like you were out there all by yourselves. So then a lobster boat or somebody else shows up, it really stuck out. It just became a part of the scene and part of the memory. I don't know when I will have time to go back to those parts of the coast, I don't know. But they definitely left their imprint on my memory.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
I remember when I was going through a certain phase of my life that had changed, I just had gone through a very big upheaval and there was a certain element of returning back to pick up things that I had almost kind of left like bread crumbs to my past life. In the sense that it wasn't as if I had emerged from that past life, but somehow I was becoming more integrative of my entire self when I went back to that. So as you're describing this and you're describing this missing piece, I have the sense that it is entirely possible to be living a life that you thoroughly enjoy, and also, there's that past sense of yourself that somehow still is kind of wandering around on its own.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. I mean, as a parent there's always this sort of before and after. Maybe marriage, before and after. So yes, there's some element of this having been some element of my life before. Before what, I don’t know? Kids, wife, house, mortgage, dogs. But it was really important at the time. The work, I loved the work. It was impactful. It seemed to have made life changing experiences for a variety of people. But selfishly, I loved it. I loved, loved seeing the coast. I loved sailing it, I loved exploring it. I loved knowing islands by name, even if I only saw them once or twice. It was like I could stand in one spot and name islands. And you know, just got to know the coast of Maine like you know your hometown. And that was pretty cool. That was just, as a kid from Connecticut, something that I had never experienced. I knew the roads names of my town, but now I was knowing these huge geographical spaces and the depths of water and where certain rocks were hiding under the water. So that was different. That was cool. And we've tried to show our kids a little bit of that and that seems to be probably the best way to get back out there, is to charter a sailboat and go out with the family. But we're not up at five in the morning, and we're definitely not sailing through the night. So it's different. It's definitely different.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Well, also your children are teenagers at this point.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. Just barely. One teenager and one 11 year old. So I don’t know how interested they're going to be in mom and dad showing them around. It might be time to put them in an Outward Bound boat and send them off.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
That's a thought! Well, you've become one of, I believe, one of the best selling artists in the Portland Art Gallery as your art has continued to evolve. I don't know, maybe you don't know that. Maybe I'm not allowed to say that, but here we are. So there you go. And this has been a very specific choice. You had to actually say, okay, I'm going to focus on this right now. This is what my life is going to look like. And maybe it's a little scary, but this is the direction I'm going in.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. I mean, I would be in trouble if I didn't say that I had help. And my wife, Jill, was hugely supportive and still is hugely supportive. She supported me through all those times when paintings didn't sell or they sold for, I made little paintings and sold them for little money. And we would sit down at the kitchen table and do the books. Is this really working? Is this not working? Thankfully, I had a teaching job at the time, so it afforded me some flexibility to manage both things at once, painting and teaching. And so that carried me through and continued to carry me through with kids and schedule. But it was definitely a leap. And even now paintings like this painting, which is again more from imagination than say a postcard documentation of Portland Headlight or some corner of Acadia. It feels like I'm taking a risk. This is something that I came up with. And so I don't know if it's going to resonate with anybody when I'm making it. I don't know if somebody's going to go, well, I don't know what that is. That's a lobster boat and some funny house on an island. I don't know where this is. I don't know what this is. So I guess maybe just taking that role of the dice now with experimenting with different ideas of what a painting of the Maine landscape can be. For myself that feels more of a different approach. But I still love making just a straight landscape painting, just recording what I know. Making paintings of places I know, places that I'm familiar with, places that have meaning for me. I tend not to travel with my paints or go on vacation with paints. I just don't know how to step onto some landscape that I've only known for a week on vacation and then try to make a painting of it that feels sort of forced at some level.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
So it's fascinating that to you, putting yourself into the piece more through your imagination involves risk. Because really everything that you do is one big risk and it's all really evolving pretty significantly in your imagination.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. I mean, I guess as artists that you're right, we just sort of throw it out there and hope it resonates with somebody. And that's maybe the risk. How risky can I get though? I really love the work of this Cuban American artist named Julio La Ross. He's a fairly well known painter, and he's been well known for a long time. And he'll paint scenes that are reminiscent of, say, a Wyeth composition, whether it's Andrew or Jamie. But his most recent painting I was shocked by, it was a painting of the Space station. And at first glance you think, oh, this is some kind of abstract black and white image. But then you realize like, oh no, this is a space capsule at the Space station. And I just thought, wow, that's really risky. That's really taking a leap. And I loved it. And I thought, could I ever do that? Could I ever start painting space stations? Who's going to want a space station painting over their fireplace? That's the sort of moment when you feel like you're pulling the reins back on yourself. As much as I loved his painting, could I do it? I don't know. If I could pull it off, that would be really cool. So it might be more something I do for myself but that was a big risk. Space stations, I don't know.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Well, what you're saying is will people be able to relate to you? So you're kind of making a guess as to the possibility of the collective unconscious, right? You just don't really know necessarily where your own head is at, where the people around you are, where their heads are at. But what is it that's going to somehow appeal to others? And that is kind of uncertain.
Cooper Dragonette:
You just reminded me of a conversation I had with Emma Wilson at the gallery, because I was asking her about a couple of subject matters, a couple of topics that I thought, is this going to work in the gallery? I think it was really just like winter paintings, snow paintings. And I said, “What do you think? Should I do it? Should I include it? Should I not include it?” And she just wrote back “Do what you love.” And I thought, oh yes, right, that's the best approach. Just paint what you love. I don't know if that's going to take me down the road with space stations, but it's a good one to fall back on and just paint what you love.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Well, it sounds a little cliche, I think. And I'm not, I'm sorry, I don't mean you're a cliche. That is not what I'm saying. What I am saying though is that having spoken to various people over time, artists, I do think that when you get to that place where you're doing something that is you and that you've kind of got the softness around it. It's the very idea of letting the animal love what it loves. I do think that that kind of brings you to this place that other people recognize. Right. And see as this sort of highest version of yourself and who doesn't resonate with that.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes, I agree. Yes. Painting what you love and I suppose it's true for writing. I guess it's the connection. It's the key. I would definitely need to feel the connection to the place or the image or the moment. That to me would be one of the key ingredients to making a successful painting. And to not have that in there could really undermine the whole thing. It's part of the foundation for making a successful painting. It is painting for me anyway.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
But then it's always the question of what I know and what I love. Is this something that people will see as being something that they could know and love that they could connect with. And it seems like more of a risk that you're putting yourself out there as a human being and saying, okay, what do you think of me? And I think we all have that kind of basic human need to feel accepted.
Cooper Dragonette:
Yes. It's like telling a joke. I mean, if you think it's funny, is everybody else gonna think it's funny? So I guess, I'm definitely not unconscious of the fact that this is going in front of an audience and how are they going to feel about it and will it resonate? Would I want it in my own house? Would I think it's a funny joke, would I think it's a great story? I guess I'm always looking at painting as analogies for something. And painting could be cooking, painting is building a house and all those things. And so all those ingredients that go into making a great meal or building a home that's all there and painting as well. It's gotta have a strong foundation. But the details matter. The composition is key to presentation. All of that seems to be important in making a painting. Then whether it resonates with somebody or not, I suppose that's up to them. If they think it's a good looking painting or if they want it in their home. That's always the best award of all is when somebody decides to bring it home with them. That's the best. That really, that worked. You like it enough to bring it home with you. That feels pretty good.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
Well, I've enjoyed, again, our conversation. I think every time I talk to you, I learn a little bit more. And also I think you're talking about things that many of us can relate to, especially people who have lived a certain number of years on the planet. I think it's just kind of a common thing that happens over time, but sometimes taking the time to reflect on it, I think is something that we don't do.
Cooper Dragonette:
Right. No, not enough anyways.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
So I appreciate your willingness to do that with me today.
Cooper Dragonette:
Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa Belisle:
I've been speaking with Artist Cooper Dragonette. You can see his work at the Portland Art Gallery or on the Portland Art Gallery website. I am Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine. Thanks for being here today. Thank you.
Learn more about this artist:
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