“There are moments throughout my life where I felt I was able to hop into a painting and escape to enjoy past memories or just to feel that warm, fulfilling, beautiful feeling most of us need throughout our space and lives.”
About Me
Maria Cooper was born in the heartland of America in Kentucky, but it was her formative years spent in Belgium and throughout Europe that built the foundation for her love of art. Her exposure to the world of art continued during her teenage years when her family moved to the U.S. near Savannah, Georgia, a historic port city known for its robust art scene and culture.
Maria has been a creator her entire life. From the days of her childhood when she began experimenting in different mediums and substrates, through her preparatory school days where her instructors told her that her art was “wrong,” Maria has always been compelled to create. Maria seeks to push the envelope of “accepted styles” while simultaneously working on converting her life’s challenges and adversities into inspiration, design, and intrigue.
A significant influence on Maria’s life was her grandmother. Maria recalls that her grandmother’s house was like a museum overflowing with paintings. Those paintings spoke to Maria’s heart then and still do to this day.
After graduating from Georgia Southern University, Maria moved to Miami, where she sought to apply her artistic skills in the commercial design industry. Upon arrival in 2008, the United States economic crisis hit, and Miami was significantly impacted. Maria was soon out of work from the company, who had promised her a lucrative career. Nevertheless, not one to shy from adversity, Maria successfully overcame those challenges and credits this time in her life to much of the inspiration for her works and creativity.
Maria’s eclectic style and influences within the abstract and surreal led her to apply her commercial design skills with her artistic gifts to venues that supported her whimsical influences. In addition to commissioned commercial works, Maria was responsible for unique and marquee installations at some of Miami’s most iconic clubs, eateries, and resorts.
Having produced and created concurrently with her professional commercial hospitality design career, Maria built a substantial portfolio and has begun to release select works.
Maria’s style is evocative of her transition and journey through challenge and adversity while maintaining a loving spirit and relentless harbor of hope and expectation. She has channeled joy, pain, disappointment, transformation, and revelation in many of her pieces. She seeks to grant the viewer of her creations an openness whereby her clients and their experiences can become a part of her art.
Maria creates in multiple mediums to include acrylic, oil, and mixed mediums on canvas; sketches and charcoals; mixed medium collage; and digital art.
