Newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle, a traveling correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain from 1935 until his death in 1945, once wrote of Pittsburgh: "It must have been laid out by a mountain goat. It's up and down, and around and around and in betwixt."
Those words could not ring more true when looking at Douglas Cooper's latest mural-size drawings, on display at Concept Art Gallery in Regent Square.
His fourth solo exhibit at the gallery, "Stairways to Heaven: Churches and City Steps of Pittsburgh," features 15 large-scale drawings, as well as 20 or so on-the-spot sketches, all drawn from some very unique vantage points, emphasizing the twists and turns of a cityscape that rivals that of San Francisco, Cincinnati and Portland.
All are complete with some of Pittsburgh's 300-plus staircases and handful of its dozens upon dozens of churches. After all, it wouldn't be Pittsburgh without those two historically important elements.
You might recognize Cooper's work by way of his large-scale mural project that hangs in the Senator John Heinz History Center, or another that lines the rotunda in Carnegie Mellon's University Center, where Cooper has taught drawing and design in the architecture department since 1976.
Like the latter work, which combines Pittsburgh history with Andrew Carnegie's academic endeavors, many of Cooper's drawings here combine the old with the new.
"Steve's Corner," for example, features a downward view of Polish Hill from Bigelow Boulevard. The buildings in the foreground, such as Immaculate Heart of Mary Church and the YMPAA (Young Men's Polish Athletic Association), are from the present day. But look closer, and you will find a coal hopper next to a steel mill that no longer exists, the old station shed from the Pennsylvania Railroad, the incline that used to run from the Hill District down to the Strip District, even the old bridges that once converged on the Point.
"I climb times," Cooper says of his drawings. "I don't think cities are just what they are. They are what they used to be, and they are what they might be. When people visit cities, they don't necessarily see the same place at the same time ... in other words, there is this kind of shifting sand. A city is what it was and what it is, and people see it differently due to their different associations with it."
Thus, his drawings also are diaries of his own personal experiences. For example, in all that include the Allegheny River, one will find a dragon boat, because Cooper is a member of The Steel City Dragons, a Pittsburgh-area Dragon Boat Team. And in some drawings, like "Steve's Corner," there are personal notations that identify friends' houses.
In no way pretending to depict the shiny bright city of today, Cooper confidently transforms the city into something of a childhood dreamscape. Something which hearkens to his earliest memories of coming here by train from Connecticut, accompanying his father on business trips.
Now 61, Cooper recalls: "Probably one of the most exciting memories that I have in my entire lifetime is accompanying my father on a night train in 1953. We passed the Horseshoe Curve in moonlight. Then we passed through Johnstown, where the steel mills were still operable. And then, arriving in Pittsburgh underneath the Westinghouse Bridge, seeing it like it was an entrance portal into this amazing place."
Instead of focusing on one thing specifically in his drawings, Cooper focuses on the city as if it were a magical place. This creates a sense that you can "fall into" the drawings, he says.
"I'm not trying to model the three-dimensional world," Cooper says. "It's not about that. It's about developing ways of looking that are analogous to what you are experiencing."
To create his drawings, he makes several sketches on location, then brings all of the elements together in one large-scale work.
"I can't explain it exactly," he says about being on location, "but all I know is that, when I draw on site, I allow myself to move my body while I am looking, and this is a natural result of trying to capture what it is that I am seeing after moving."
By combining several perspectives in one view, he creates wonderfully dense and rhythmic patterns that combine specific building details with winding ribbons of road that one can follow with his own eyes as if riding a roller coaster.
You really do get the sense that you are looking down, around and, in some cases, even up. That's especially the case with the piece "Downturn," in which Cooper pushes compositional arrangement to its limits, emphasizing the steep streets of the South Side Slopes, tweaking its hills almost to the point of them being parallel to the picture plane while embracing a multi-directional sense of vision that allows the viewer to move through the drawing with his eyes in a meandering fashion.
"I was trying to get the feeling here of being underneath, down on the road, able to look up at the steps from the underside," Cooper says. "It's as if you are under the stairs, yet also on the stairs, looking down."
Cooper's work is a solid argument for retinal art. There is pure joy in these drawings, with their plunging hills and homes clinging precariously to steeply sloping cliffs. The vertiginous streets and hills of Cooper's cityscapes not only refer to specific geographic spots, but to a geomorphic layout we all can recognize.
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