(artist photo by Jeremie Deschen)

Dave Cooper was born in Nova Scotia in 1967.

Dave began his career in the 90s, making underground comics for Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books. His best work from that period was a 5-issue series called, Weasel. One story that was serialized in Weasel later became the psycho-erotic graphic novel Ripple- which sported an introduction by David Cronenberg. 

After comics, Dave turned his attention to oil painting, putting on solo shows alternately at galleries in Los Angeles and New York City. He also had a large retrospective of his comicbook artwork in both Angouleme and Paris in 2002. Monographs of his paintings from that time included introductions by comedian David Cross, and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. 

Around 2008 Dave began focussing on the field of animation, ultimately getting two of his original kids tv shows greenlit- PIG GOAT BANANA CRICKET for Nickelodeon, and THE BAGEL AND BECKY SHOW for Teletoon/BBC. His short adult film, THE ABSENCE OF EDDY TABLE was released in the fall of 2016 to much acclaim.

In the summer of 2017 Dave returned to oil painting, embarking on personal explorations, commissions. He also completed his largest single commission for the Madrid museum Coleccion Solo- a 13′ wide nod to Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.  

When the pandemic hit, Dave spent a couple of years working as a visual development artist on feature film projects at Sony Pictures, and Dreamworks. During that same time he made time to continue expanding the scope of his personal work, experimenting with new, perverse worlds and characters on canvas and paper, writing animated and live-action screenplays, and on composing experimental music.

Since 2017 -concurrent with all those various projects- Dave has been gradually amassing a body of ambitious new work for his largest gallery show to date- 42 paintings for Galerie Daniel Maghen, in Paris 2023. 

In 2019, the French publisher Cernunnos released a 400-pg English/French retrospective of Dave’s work, Pillowy, the art of dave cooper. Also in 2019, Dave joined the board of directors of Ottawa’s cutting edge artist run centre Saw Gallery.

In 2022 Dave’s first live-action short film, Squash was accepted into prestigious film festivals- Finland’s Tampere Film Festival, and Italy’s Concorto Film Festival.

Dave maintains a healthy presence on instagram where he posts past work, new work, work-in-progress videos, and absolutely riveting bicycling and cooking snapshots. You can find him at @davecooper67. He also sells selected original works at davecooper.bigcartel.com

Dave lives in Ottawa Canada.