Lot 1068
Ronald Cooper (KY, 1931-2012), Hell Shoe
Lot Details & Additional Photographs
7 x 11 1/2 x 4 in.
Private Collection of American Folk Art, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Purchased from Ledbetter Folk Art Auctions in 2023.
Ronald and Jessie Cooper became artists by chance in their mid-fifties. Prior to that, their lives had followed a path common for their generation: early marriage, leaving their home-town for better opportunities, raising four children, working in a variety of jobs, financial challenges, health problems, and so on. With no relevant background, their journey into the world of art was taken with no expectations.
The youngest of eleven children, Ronald Cooper was born in 1931 in Plummers Mill, a tiny farming community in north-east Kentucky. He grew up attending the local Christian Holiness Church, and this religious grounding was later to have a defining influence on his work as an artist. In 1949 he married Jessie Dunaway, a local girl, who was sixteen at the time.
After a number of years of working in grocery stores and supermarkets in Kentucky and Ohio, the Coopers ran a country store, but when this failed after eight years Ronald took a job in quality control on the assembly line at Frigidaire and Jessie found employment on the production line at a ‘peanut factory’.
After two heart attacks and a motor accident, the Coopers moved into a mobile home. To occupy Ronald’s mind, their children bought him some electric-powered woodworking tools, and he began to make simple wooden toys cut out of flat pieces of timber, which were then painted by Jessie and sold in local craft shops. In 1987, Tom Sternal, an art professor at Morehead State University, Kentucky came across their work and encouraged them to try their hand at personal expression.
Bio courtesy of Raw Vision
Good estate condition.
