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Incandescence

Rising Above Darkness, Memoir & Art

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Full-Color Edition. "Clare's stories are well-written, entertaining, yet bittersweet, and they contain universal themes that surely will resonate with readers. Cooley's tales reveal the dramatic story of a woman who overcame enormous obstacles through determination and creativity. The subject matter is timely and can help many. As a writer, Clare has her own unique and articulate voice. This book will help others confront their own demons." Claire Kirch-Publishing Industry Veteran Sixteen-year-old Clare Cooley is standing on an overpass, thinking about jumping into the traffic below. At her young age, she has yet to kiss a boy, but she is pregnant after being raped and faces a choice-surrender to the darkness or rise above it. Clare Cooley's powerful and provocative memoir chronicles her journey from growing up in a dangerously dysfunctional family to becoming a self-made successful prolific artist. No one in her chaotic family noticed when she stopped attending school regularly at seven years old, and she did not return until she was asked to teach in her twenties. Cooley's evocative stories follow her saga hitchhiking with truckers, fasting alone for three days on a mountaintop, being one of the first females to work with the longshoremen on Lake Superior, innocently ending up in jail, nearly perishing at sea, and being deported from a country. Cooley fearlessly reflects on moments of great adversity and expanding epiphany, dealing with abuse, addiction, suicide, teen motherhood, misogyny, raising her damaged drug addicted sister's children, and confronting her father about his violent crimes. Cooley writes eloquently and authentically about growing up a sensitive, free-spirited daughter of a brilliant but broken pedophile father and a gentle artist mother. Cooley charts her sojourn from her first home in a quonset hut in the Arizona desert, to bouncing around the country with her family, then leaving home at seventeen to travel the U.S. alone, sometimes living in a tent, a teepee, a car, and an abandoned building. Cooley reflects on the power of facing painful truths, expressing them, and healing. A deeply vulnerable narrative that explores transcendence through artistic expression, Incandescence is dark and luminous, personal, and universal. Cooley chronicles the dark times in her life and how her focus on creativity helped her transform it into art. Cooley developed an arts curriculum that she taught to all grade levels, including universities and institutions and created a career as a creativity coach, sharing what she learned about the capability of expression to transform adversity into advantage through art. Cooley's authentic voice shines through with heart and whimsy in her insightful illuminations of decades of prolific creativity, inner exploration, and meditations on what makes people happy. As evidence of her rise above darkness, Cooley's masterful art offers moments of serenity between chapters.

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Clare's many years of creativity coaching confirmed what she believed to be true-artistic expression comes naturally. Unfortunately, many do not have it nurtured and can lose connection to their creativity over time. Clare credits her classically trained fine artist mother who was a major contributing factor in Clare staying connected to her imagination and always encouraged her to follow her inspiration. Clare is committed to helping others reconnect with, or strengthen their connection to their creativity as her mother did for her. Her mother referred to Clare as the "elegant primitive" because of her self-taught refined style. She told her daughter, "The rules do not matter for you. You would just have to forget them if you learned them because you follow your instincts and figure it out. This is most unusual for artists. Many overwork their pieces. You stop when it's done. Keep trusting yourself, dear."Clare's art portrays the sublimely simple designs of nature and the expanse of the universe. Her art comes from her reverence for natural harmony and her curiosity about the ineffable cosmos. Her art is influenced by the time we are in when living in harmony with nature is crucial. Clare's art inspires us to rise to our luminous potential as guardians of the environment and its creatures. Creating with whatever she had to work with was her way to express anytime and be in creative reverie whenever possible. Her first memories were dancing, sculpting, and making assemblages of found objects in nature. She began writing poetic prose before she read a book. She designed and hand-painted clothing then made jewelry and accessories. Sumi-e ink brush became her first graphic art practice, then playing a porcelain flute as a meditation, then doing pen and ink line drawings of nature. She designed or created most of the things in her home-furniture and furnishings, dishes, floral and tabletop arrangements, window and wall treatments, art, framing, and displays. Recently, she added the art form that can combine all others-video with her movie-making son. Though best known for her crane paintings, she paints everything from insects to outer space, classic to modern, in her unique dream-like realism style. With over 500 paintings, drawings, and etchings in her house, "The Emerald Lady," a guest said, "It is a living museum with the heart of a home." Clare was too busy creating to count her creations until recently for a video project. When her unique creations reached over 2,000, she understood for the first time why people say she is prolific.Clare's first public showing was her glass etchings in the Park Point Art Fair, Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1970s. Since then, her art has been exhibited in a wide variety of venues from small cafes to fine restaurants and wineries, galleries, corporate headquarters of a number of Fortune 500 companies, the Natural World Museum of Art, the Karpeles Museum, the cover of the Red Rose catalog, and on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art tours.Her art, writing, and designs were published by Pomegranate Artbooks in her Book of Cranes after observing all fifteen species of cranes in person.In her twenties, Clare was asked to begin teaching her interdisciplinary curriculum "Dancing into the Arts." She has worked with every grade level in public schools, at universities, psychiatric hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers, crisis shelters, juvenile halls, and with the participants and staff of mental health and drug courts. She has worked with therapists, probation officers, lawyers, judges, nurses, and many other types of groups and individuals.As a creativity coach, she loves guiding people home to themselves. Her work is based on her experience that the greater access we have to our imaginations, the confidence to express it, and the courage to share it, the more we have to work with to enhance our own lives, hope, heal, and contribute to others and our world.