Valerie P. Cohen (May 9, 1946-March 16, 2024)

Valerie P. Cohen (May 9, 1946-March 16, 2024)

Growing up in Pasadena, California, Valerie Patricia Cohen completed B.A. and M.A. degrees in English at the University of California.  She worked as a typesetter, illustrator, writer, ski patrolman, and National Park Service law enforcement ranger, began painting full-time in the mid-1980s and studied with Milford Zones and Katherine Chang Liu.  She had many solo exhibits, and her watercolors have appeared frequently in national and international juried shows, including the Yosemite Renaissance, California Watercolor Association, San Diego Watercolor Society, Arizona Aqueous, Taos National, and Watercolor West. Her paintings illustrate A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin, written by her husband, Michael P. Cohen (1998). In all, she illustrated twelve books, including Tree Lines, and Granite and Grace: Seeking the Heart of Yosemite (University of Nevada Press, 2017, 2019). Cohen also wrote and edited a book about her mother, the well-known mountain-climber Ruth Dyar Mendenhall: Woman on the Rocks: The Mountaineering Letters of Ruth Dyar Mendenhall, (Spotted Dog Press, 2007)

Her hands and eyes established their own peaceful authoritative justice through watercolor and ink, as her work appeared locally, here and there along the East Side of the Sierra, at Sarah Adams’ Gallery by Mono Lake, or the Mono Lake Committee’s gallery, the Visitors Center at Schulman Grove, and the June Lake Library. Her website will continue at valeriepcohen.com.

This is what she said about her work:

“Here are some visual influences on my watercolors: snow, sandstone, granite, anything above timberline, deserts, oceans, and interchanges of Los Angeles freeways. Navajo weavings—Ganado Reds and Two Grey Hills—weavings that are really landscapes. The skeletons of dormant trees. The skeletons of dead animals. These influences show an attraction to stark, simple designs.”

“Landscape is not a solved problem. I realize that for my whole life I have been attracted to stark designs. I want people to look at my paintings and to wonder.  Why are some things swirling around, and other things sitting still? Why are some things so big, and others so small? Are those trees happy, or sad? In what ways are the past, present, and future all wrapped up together in the West?  My paintings of the Great Basin explore emptiness, or, as the poet Wallace Stevens calls it, ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’”