Hi, I’m Scott Cooper

I'm a PASSIONATE artist/graphic designer & educator with 30 years of experience in the graphic design and art industry.

I teach both traditional and digital graphic design; I’m also an illustrator and fine artist, and I am qualified to teach any of these disciplines from introductory to senior level courses. My students include two winners of student Addy Awards. My industry portfolio includes work for Paramount Studios, Bard College, the Jerome Levy Economics Institute, Scholastic, Twin Engines Coffee, novelist Kathryn Loch, and historian Louis Vidaurri.

My design practice grows from my expanding perception that art is creating something, whether it be a digital design or an oil painting or a sculpture that expresses something in, I hope, a universally accessible way. When I was a young BFA, I thought art began and ended with the pen, the pencil and paint; along the way, computers were invented, and have since become one of the most powerful tools available to artists, whether working in sound, light, motion, or the negative space between objects.

I’m no longer convinced that “Fine Art” is a separate category of skills from “Illustration” or “Graphic Design” and I question the divisions in the art community as a whole that place more value on one type of creation than on another.Truthfully, the same fundamental skills are critical to any artist- the ability to create an object that functions properly doesn’t exclude the possibility of beauty of form.

I aim to create a conversation between fine art and art done for hire- neither is less nor more than the other, and marginalizing one approach doesn’t make another approach better or less- but it does diminish art as a whole to place artificial divisions in paramount positions. I hope to show that each art, each artist, is inherently valuable.