Athena Cooper Cards

Working in small scale acrylic on stretched canvas, Athena’s landscape paintings and portraiture blend depictions of the everyday with the fractured light and intense colour inspired by stained glass.

Athena Cooper is an award-winning visual artist and creativity coach based in Calgary, Canada. Self-taught as an acrylic painter, Athena’s paintings are explorations of what it means to live an extraordinary, ordinary disabled life.

Through her paintings, Athena highlights the ways that a disabled life is different, but also incredibly ordinary. Whether it’s challenging the asexual perception of people with disabilities by highlighting the inter-abled relationship with her husband or depicting her wheelchair with a neutral emotional charge more typical of a piece of furniture, these are all ways that she seeks to shift the narrative away from the exceptional nature of disability to a more normative, inclusive viewpoint.

Her landscape paintings are also a commentary on the way people with disabilities are assumed to exist only in interior spaces. Be it a startling sunset or a burst of light through the trees, these pieces speak to the notion of “I was there and, for a fleeting moment, this is what I saw.”