By DIANE PHILLIPS

KEVIN Cooper is a Bahamian artist. Like many who have that rare ability to turn a raw canvas into a work of art, he knows the importance of light. For Cooper, it is the magic of the golden light of early morn or the silver light of eve that triggers the rush to paint whatever is bathed by it.

In some ways, Cooper is luckier than most. He lives in Rock Sound, Eleuthera, where there is something magical about the natural light. Maybe it is the absence of tall buildings casting shadows, maybe it is the sun reflecting off surrounding waters, but whatever it is, when Cooper leaves his home in the pre-dawn hour searching for that light critical to telling the story he wants to portray on canvas, the light of Eleuthera is like the trusted friend he keeps close by his side.

He is lucky in another way. Unlike some creatives who await inspiration, Cooper paints almost daily. Laden with camera, canvas, his brushes and paints, he waits for the sun to introduce itself to the day. When it does, his heart beats faster, the clock is ticking, he has to make the most of every second.

“You may have only 30 or 40 minutes when the light is perfect,” he says, “when it catches the water a certain way before the clouds come or the wind changes or something else changes it. And that is all the time you will have to paint that scene, to capture that moment on that day.”

Cooper knows how precious every moment is.

The light, like time, is fleeting.

He had too little time with his daughter, Tahliah, before she passed away in 2022 at the age of 24. A Ministry of Tourism junior rep, she later became the first Junior Minister of Tourism from a family island. Tahliah, says Cooper, brought a light of her own to everything she touched – studying, earning her Master’s degree, teaching early education, caring for her mother, a young woman full of life, purpose and promise who became a victim of sickle cell anemia.

Fleeting light and time

Cooper thinks about the fleeting light and time a lot. He grabs the light as if he could hoard it. For the last five years light has been the answer to a prayer, allowing him to paint, producing art, saving the life of his wife, Hope.

Every canvas he turns into art that sells funds the co-payment for $25,000-a-dose medicine keeping Hope alive.

In 2020, just before The Bahamas locked down for COVID, Hope Cooper, a multiple-award-winning teacher at Preston H Albury High School in Eleuthera (alma mater of Olympic gold medalist Chris ‘Fireman’ Brown), was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer.

“Everybody loves Hope,” says Cooper. “She was named Teacher of the Year so many times I joked and said she should give someone else a chance. She laughed. Then all of a sudden, the diagnosis, Stage 4.”

It was a bombshell that struck like a death threat.

A local cancer specialist knew how serious the case was and referred her to MD Anderson in Houston.

The Cooper family went for a visit and stayed two years.

Chances of survival were slim, but the Coopers came fully armed. They had grit, strong will and a determination they shared. When one family member started to wear out, another would shoulder the weight, no one left, no one varied from the end goal – keep Hope alive, make her well, bring her home to the Eleuthera where she was loved and where she wanted to be.

Painting and prayers

For two long years, there was the daily medical routine and the prayers and the painting. There were tough times, periods following treatments that seemed almost unbearable, but Hope Cooper had proven that with the right medical attention, the willingness to try the experimental and withstand the agony of radiation and chemo and more, survival past Stage 4 was possible.

In 2022, the Coopers did what seemed like the impossible. They returned to Eleuthera, a family of four just as they had left. Hope Cooper began the slow path to resuming a somewhat normal, albeit much slower, routine, daughter Tahliah was able to combine working with caring for Mom and eventually, as Mom recovered, moving on to Nassau where she taught school. Then one day she did not answer the phone when Dad called … and the daughter who helped her mother turn her back on death’s door had walked through it herself.

Cooper, grief-stricken but strong, juggles painting with continuing to nurse his wife back to health. She is now driving again. He is a great father to son Joshua, 18, an Engineering student at college in Texas, who is still recovering from discovering his sister’s body following the sickle cell crisis that took her life.

Cooper chases the light to continue paying the medical costs of keeping the woman he loves alive.

“I took a vow, ‘in sickness and in health,’ and I never questioned it, not for a second,” he said.