Obituary: Floyd Cooper

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Award-winning author-illustrator Floyd Cooper, widely lauded for his evocative and luminous paintings depicting the African American experience, died on Friday, July 16, after being ill with cancer, in Easton, Pa. He was 65.

Cooper was born January 8, 1956 in Tulsa, Okla. In a guest post for ed tech company Mackin’s Books in Bloom series, Cooper revealed that his earliest recollection of creating art was from the age of three. “I plucked a piece of gypsum board from a scrap heap left by my Dad who was perched on a ladder, working on building our house,” he wrote. “I used that chalky piece of wallboard to scratch little shapes onto the side of my Dad’s house.”

Cooper described an unsettled childhood in Tulsa following his parents’ divorce that involved attending all 11 elementary schools in the city at various times. “With each new school, I quickly learned the currency of my art,” he wrote. “I would seek out the art teacher and ‘buy’ myself a new friend with my artwork.” His teachers’ encouragement during his school years led Cooper to continue honing his art skills and it paid off. At the end of high school, he was awarded an art scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, from which he graduated with a B.F.A. in 1978.

Read full post on Publisher’s Weekly