“The Secret Lives of Stories”

Artist: Jen Cooney

707 Penn Gallery

Sept. 4 through Oct…. “The Secret Lives of Stories”

Artist: Jen Cooney

707 Penn Gallery

Sept. 4 through Oct. 17

At the opening reception of her new exhibition, “The Secret Lives of Stories,” Jen Cooney attracted as many gazes as her art.

She wore a white fur mini skirt, vest and hood. Her makeup, done by a drag queen friend of hers, was turquoise, spectacular and topped off with some of the biggest faux eyelashes in history.

“I try to be creative in everything. Every part of life,” Cooney said.

Cleary, she does.

Cooney’s interest in art and all things creative started at an early age.

“Ever since I was a child, I liked art. My mom’s really creative. I just always loved to draw as a kid. I would draw little pictures for my friends. They’d be like, ‘Draw me a cat!’ And I’d be like, ‘Okay!’” she said.

She doodled her way through high school before going on to Edinboro University to study metalsmithing.

“I think I have ADD, but I was never diagnosed. I always had a hard time paying attention in school. So I would draw tons — there was probably more drawings than notes in my notebooks,” she said.

Cooney graduated from Edinboro with the metalsmithing degree but no longer works in the field.

“I just wanted to do art, and I changed my mind a million times. I just wanted to be expressing myself,” she said.

When she spoke about art, Cooney’s passion was evident.

“It’s not even a career, it’s my life. I just need to do art. I make it all the time. If I couldn’t make art …” Her voice paused and her gaze wandered, perhaps picturing a sad, colorless life without art. The break lasted only a moment, though, for Cooney’s real world is far more fun.

“The Secret Lives of Stories” is a surreal, colorful and character-filled experience. Stepping inside the 707 Penn Gallery is like stepping onto the page of a children’s book — coincidentally, Cooney is thinking about going to graduate school for illustration since people frequently tell her to go into the children’s story business.

Two walls are covered with tiny ink drawings depicting people and animals. Another area displays a cluster of pictures connected by a weaving rainbow painted right onto the wall. Her most magnificent pieces, though, are larger colored works crammed full of detail.

But Cooney didn’t stop on the page. She extended the scenery and characters to the walls. Bats fly off the page and toward the ceiling. Trees grow beyond the canvas, and tiny mushroom people high-five in front of a hollow.

“My work kind of illustrates another world. If you look at them, it’s almost like you’re looking through little windows on stories,” Cooney said. “I really like travel. So it’s almost like meditation, and I get to go on these adventures and journeys that I wouldn’t be able to in real life. “

How does she come up with these fantastical people and places? “A lot of times if someone’s in my life a lot or if they’re really close to me, they’re in the pieces as people, and they’ll get brought into the adventures. But animals are usually their own thing. I like to create animals, but I won’t draw people who don’t exist in real life. I have a really hard time doing that, they never look right,” Cooney said.

When asked how she gets from blank canvas to finished product, Cooney responds, “That’s more difficult. I don’t like to think too much. Really,

I don’t think a lot, and it gets me into trouble.”

Her smallest pieces can be finished in a matter of hours, but her larger works take days and even months.

“Usually, I just sit in front of this blank page. One’s imagination is so much more complicated to draw out. If I have too much of an idea, I can’t

capture it, and then I’ll be disappointed. I’ll have one little idea, like, ‘I want to draw a dolphin.’ And then I’ll just take it from there and work for hours and get it done,” she said.

Inspiration is complicated, and Cooney said that it can come from anything.

“I think as an artist you’re a sponge, so you absorb everything. You absorb things in the environment, things that you read and see. You steal things from other people’s artwork,” she said. “You’re like, ‘I really like what they did,’ and then you make it your own. So you become this sponge soaked full of crap and you squeeze it out and make something.”