Featured image: Cheetah in Fantasy Time, Eileen Cooper, 2025, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.
Eileen Cooper’s paintings explore the imaginative thresholds where human joy, nature, and dreamlike fantasy converge.
Eileen Cooper blends human figures, animals, and dreamlike settings to explore imagination, innocence, and the surreal edges of human experience.
Known for her vibrant storytelling and theatrical use of figures, Cooper often stages her subjects within surreal environments that feel both tender and uncanny. In these three works, she juxtaposes children’s innocence with wild animals and cosmic landscapes, creating scenes that question the boundaries between real and imagined worlds.
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Dancing on the World, Eileen Cooper, 2001, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in. / 76.2 x 121.92 cm.
A circle of dancers whirls across the blue planet itself, their hands linked in a celebration of unity. The swirling brushstrokes of earth and sea suggest a living, breathing globe, while two bears observe from the edge of the cosmos. The painting balances childlike wonder with mythic scale, offering a vision of togetherness that transcends species and geography.
Zebras & Beach Children, Eileen Cooper, 2001, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in. / 76.2 x 121.92 cm.
Children play freely in the sand as zebras wander calmly through the shallow surf. The improbable pairing evokes both humor and curiosity, collapsing natural habitats into a single, dreamlike stage. Cooper emphasizes gesture and movement, the children digging, running, and stretching, as a counterpoint to the stillness of the animals, highlighting the coexistence of different rhythms of life.
Rhinos & Swimmers, Eileen Cooper, 2001, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in. / 60.96 x 91.44 cm.
A swimming pool becomes the site of surreal encounter as children splash and dive beneath the gaze of rhinoceroses drinking from the same water. The joyful chaos of the swimmers contrasts with the slow, grounded presence of the animals, blurring distinctions between play and survival. Cooper transforms a familiar suburban scene into something uncanny, where the ordinary slips into myth.
Across these works, Cooper constructs fantastical spaces where innocence, nature, and imagination interlace. Her paintings remind us that the boundaries we perceive, between child and adult, human and animal, real and unreal, are fragile and permeable. The result is art that feels at once joyous, uncanny, and deeply human.
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Pink Face, Eileen Cooper, 2025, oil on canvas board, 8 x 6 in. / 20.32 x 15.24 cm.
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