The Red Fiddle

She dressed herself in scarves, rings, fingerless gloves, and a turban. At her neck she always wore a small framed painting made into a brooch. On afternoon walks through Covington, Kentucky, she carried her sketchbook and paints. She had studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, graduated from the University of Kentucky, taken herself to Paris and to Mexico, and sat under Hans Hofmann — the same Hans Hofmann who shaped the entire generation of American abstract expressionists — and come back home to Kentucky and kept making work anyway. Lela Cooney was born in 1904 and died in 1995 at the age of 91, and the word her obituary used to describe her was not "painter" or "teacher" — it was that she "carried contagious optimism."

The Red Fiddle is marker on paper, signed, dated 1960, and it has the quality of someone who knows exactly what she is doing and has stopped trying to prove it. The fiddle doesn't emerge from a defined outline — it emerges from layered mark-making, color and line building the form together, the whole composition carrying a rhythm that makes the subject feel less like an object and more like a sound. This is what Hofmann's influence sounds like when it has been fully absorbed and made personal: not an academic exercise in abstraction but a piece of music rendered in marker, loose and confident and alive.

Cooney worked as Art Director for Covington Public Schools and later at Baker-Hunt, teaching children and adults for decades. Her paintings appeared at the Cincinnati Art Museum. A piece she made of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — described as a dramatic interpretation of powerful music in surges of blue and yellow — hung for years in the Kentucky Post building. She was regional in her life and entirely uncontained in her vision.

This is an original work on paper in its original frame and mat, reset with new Museum Tru Vue glass. Some fading to marker pigment consistent with age, minimal mat burn, light wear to the frame — all of it expected, none of it diminishing. The fading is sixty years of existing in the world. The work is still louder than the room.