Clinton Kuopus
* consigned work
Clinton Kuopus was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1942. He studied visual art and art history at Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and completed his graduate work in fine arts at Eastern Michigan University. He also served four years with the U. S. Navy as a photographic interpreter during the Viet Nam Era -- an experience that began to affect his painting in the late 1970s. He worked and taught at several Ohio colleges and universities, including Lake Erie College, University of Akron, Youngstown State University and Mount Union College, before moving to New York City in 1983. At Parsons School of Design, he taught drawing and painting in the Foundation Year Program and Illustration Department and served as Director of Exhibitions and Gallery Director. He returned to Michigan in 2004, where he continues to work as a fine artist.
Kuopus works primarily with gouache and mixed media on paper. His images concern aerial abstraction -- abstract aerial landscapes overlaid with symbols and codified information about real and imagined events that occur on the face of the earth. Kuopus sees "aerialness" as an obvious aspect of how we perceive our planet -- mainly through maps and charts of it. We describe the earth and how we divide it up in a very aerial way. Satellite photographs are part of the evening news. Aerial awareness of the landscape is really part of our collective insight about us.
Kuopus' works have been described as being both beautiful (in terms of surface, mark, and color) and emotionally haunting -- suggesting a mythic view of events both past and future. His work exists in private and corporate collections in the United States and abroad. His screenprints, made in collaboration with Stewart & Stewart, are a logical progression of his paintings on paper.