Wanda Koop completed her first major painting while in eighth grade at Winnipeg’s Lord Selkirk School. A backdrop for The Pirates of Penzance, it measured 20 feet high and 40 feet long. “I painted it in strips,” she recalls, “running them through the bedroom, the eating area, through the living room, and then marking the next piece and starting on that and never seeing the whole piece together but just imagining how it was all going to end up. And it worked beautifully.”
The scale and obsessive run-on nature of that early project still characterize Wanda Koop’s work today. The 33-year-old artist’s appetite for constructing large pieces makes her one of the most exciting—and controversial—painters to emerge recently from western Canada. The directness, vibrant palette and impressive physicality of Koop’s work led Nancy Tousley, the art critic for the Calgary Herald, to call Koop “a force to be reckoned with in current Canadian art.” Others have been moved to equally strong reactions. In the visitors’ comment book for a 1983 group exhibition called New Perceptions: Landscapes at Toronto’s Art Gallery at Harbourfront, a would-be critic fumed, “Wanda Koop should be publicly hanged.”
So begins the cover story from the inaugural Fall 1984 issue of Canadian Art. To keep reading, view a PDF of the entire article.
