Knowing and Seeing Reflections on Fifty Years of Drawing Cities

In Knowing and Seeing, muralist Douglas Cooper reflects on his long career as a muralist in various cities around the world. Part memoir and part an examination of his art, Cooper looks back on his half-century career from two points of view. First, through personal anecdotes on site sketches and finished works, and secondly, on the intellectual roots of the works. Though the core ideas of his work began in Pittsburgh, Cooper has exhibited work and produced murals, up to 200 feet long, in Cologne, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Qatar, Frankfurt, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington DC.
Memory has been a recurring theme in his art. All of Cooper’s works are driven by a desire to combine his conception of place with his perception of it―knowing and seeing. Knowing and Seeing features personal essays and more than 240 color images, including early Christian and Renaissance paintings as well as contemporary murals and other illustrations of Cooper’s unique work.

Douglas Cooper teaches drawing in Carnegie Mellon University's architecture program. Using unusual materials for public art--charcoal on paper--he has produced large (up to 200-foot-long) panoramic murals in Frankfurt, Germany, and in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.