Valerie Patricia Cohen
Valerie Patricia Cohen
Obituary
Guest Book
Valerie Cohen Obituary
Her hands and eyes established their own peaceful authoritative justice through watercolor and ink, as her work appeared locally, here and there along the East Side of the Sierra, at Sarah Adams' Gallery by Mono Lake, or the Mono Lake Committee's gallery, the Visitors Center at Schulman Grove, and the June Lake Library. Her website will continue at valeriepcohen.com.
This is what she said about her work:
"Here are some visual influences on my watercolors: snow, sandstone, granite, anything above timberline, deserts, oceans, and interchanges of Los Angeles freeways. Navajo weavings-Ganado Reds and Two Grey Hills-weavings that are really landscapes. The skeletons of dormant trees. The skeletons of dead animals. These influences show an attraction to stark, simple designs."
"Landscape is not a solved problem. I realize that for my whole life I have been attracted to stark designs. I want people to look at my paintings and to wonder. Why are some things swirling around, and other things sitting still? Why are some things so big, and others so small? Are those trees happy, or sad? In what ways are the past, present, and future all wrapped up together in the West? My paintings of the Great Basin explore emptiness, or, as the poet Wallace Stevens calls it, 'Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.'"
To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.
John Hart
June 4, 2025
I've received this news late and very sorry to hear it. What an impressive legacy! Her remark about landscape as an unsolved problem resonates with me.
Nancy Fiddler
March 14, 2025
Ah, Valerie. I remember you most when going on walks at Tioga Pass or Tuolumne that we have done together. You are there still. We have your art work in our home to remember you every day. A large painting of a Bristlecone greets us every time we descend our stairs. I have every holiday card you ever sent us pinned to a bulletin board above my desk. Sending a hug to Michael.
Judy Jennings
November 1, 2024
Mike, condolences from Judy Jennings. You and Ivan were so close and he admired you both so very much. He was like Valerie I can tell by reading the obits. Tuolumne was our favorite place in the world. Thanksgiving 1980 we climbed the Open Book over Lake Tanaya one day and ice skated the next on the lower lake on the way up Tioga Pass. The weather had changed 50 degrees.
Ivan knew you both much better than I did but he shared you with me and I am very sad about the loss of Valerie to the world. She was an amazing woman.
I attach a picture from WAY BACK! Judy Jennings (wife of Ivan Couch)
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kaaron jorgen
June 5, 2024
The first time I met Valerie we were newly moved to Utah from Tucson and I was in deep mourning for my women friends. Suddenly there was Valerie, with the same raucous humor that I had and I felt instsntl like coming "home." Over the decades we shared much laughter and understanding and art (all hers). I will hunt up some photos, her June Lake exhibitions, but for now here is one she did of our falling down homestead. What richness and saltiness she added to our lives!
Renny Russell
April 24, 2024
Nancy Dyar
April 5, 2024
As my first cousin, Valerie has been in my life since the 1940s; my first trip to Disneyland was with Valerie and sister Vivian (their parents climbed the Disneyland Matterhorn in early publicity). I met my husband Tom Higgins through her family. I have some of her art works and has been to her showings in Reno, Leaving, and Stanford University. She and I embarrassed ourselves at a Women's Ski Clinic at Alpine Meadows (old name). We talked on phone and texted several times a year. Tom and I visited son Jesse in Hawaii the year before he died, and Valerie and I talked about him together. She was an important person in my life and I will miss her. My sincere condolences to Michael. Nancy Dyar
Anne Dyar Andrews
April 5, 2024
Anne Dyar Andrews
April 5, 2024
Anne Dyar Andrews
April 5, 2024
My sisters and I were cousins of Vivian and Valerie and altho we didn't get together often we share many wonderful growing up experiences. Valerie and Michael kept in touch with us with Valerie's beautiful artistic holiday cards. My sister's and I followed Valerie's artistic career viewing her art displayed in San Francisco, Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Her creative talents will be greatly missed. I am truly sad to hear of Valerie's passing.
Nancy Dyar
April 5, 2024
As my first cousin, Valerie has been in my life since the 1940s; my first trip to Disneyland was with Valerie and sister Vivian (their parents climbed the Disneyland Matterhorn in early publicity). I met my husband Tom Higgins through her family. I have some of her art works and has been to her showings in Reno, Leaving, and Stanford University. She and I embarrassed ourselves at a Women's Ski Clinic at Alpine Meadows (old name). We talked on phone and texted several times a year. Tom and I visited son Jesse in Hawaii the year before he died, and Valerie and I talked about him together. She was an important person in my life and I will miss her. My sincere condolences to Michael. Nancy Dyar
Susan Wiggins
March 29, 2024
I met Valerie when I was in graduate school and we became friends. I have never had a friend like her and never will again. She had one of the best laughs, as others have noted. She was a fantastic cook and a voracious reader. She had opinions on just about everything from the climate crisis, to Jane Austen, to bangs! She was great fun to hike and ski with and listened attentively in conversation. In addition to several of her paintings, I have many letters from her. We both thought it novel to write one another. I miss her.
Michelle Niemann
March 26, 2024
While I didn't get to know Valerie as well as I would have liked, I enjoyed her verve when I met her. Her holiday cards were always a wonderful bolt of beauty and strangeness, with their bracing all-caps quotes -- a refreshing break in a season so full of conventionality. And I love Valerie's work. This ink tree hangs on my living room wall. It's one of her bristlecone pines and it's called "Learning to Lean." Every day it reminds me of the elegance of at once standing apart from and leaning on another, and of how much dependence there is in independence. Thank you, Valerie.
Crystal Atamian
March 26, 2024
In the summer of 2002 I lived in Lone Pine where my husband, the biologist was working at Owens Lake. In those months I explored Manzanar, Sequoia Kings Canyon, the Methuselah Grove in the White Mountains, the Alabama Hills, and the tufa formations at Mono Lake. When these places came up in conversation with Valerie the following year, we just seemed to keep talking. There are lessons she taught me that have stayed strong over the years:
1. At my baby shower, her message on a card for the future human inside me was "QUESTION AUTHORITY."
2. When everyone thought I was crazy for taking my 4-month-old daughter to the remote field site in rural Nevada that had only a pit toilet and no running water, she didn't. She simply gave me practical advice on how to do it (we still use Avon Skin-so-Soft). I needed to prove that being a mom did not change the fact that I could still be in the backcountry; she saw the panic in my eyes and understood what was going on in my heart. She had confidence in me when few others did. I found out that being with a baby in the wilderness, while challenging, was one of the most liberating and confidence-building things I could have done as a new mom. Her belief in me made a huge difference. It is a gift I will always be grateful for.
3. Two months later, she invited me to the June Lake cabin. The hikes were beautiful---full of laughs, silence, and good conversation. My daughter started crawling on that trip; we marveled at her new skill there in your cabin after one of our hikes.
4. Our many walks around the lake with Blue and my dog Scout: they are ordinary, unexceptional days that still rank among my fondest memories of her.
She was an imperfect and exceptional human who I would have loved to know and understand better than I did. You were lucky to have her and I will miss her dearly.
Ursula Heise
March 24, 2024
We love Valerie's paintings and drawings of trees and rocks and skies, and we loved seeing her doing her work in the landscape. The bristlecones will miss her - as will we. Attached a photo of Valerie drawing during a trip to the White Mountains in September 2019.
Jane Detweiler
March 24, 2024
What I will remember are all her stories about being the first woman serving as a law enforcement Ranger in Yosemite and at other national parks....her tough, fierce grace as a cancer survivor who taught others not to hide their scars in shame....her incredible, unsurpassed talent as a watercolorist and her embrace of me as an artist, too....her wisecracking humor and her love for her dogs. Farewell, Valerie. Rest in Power.
Jim Aton
March 22, 2024
I first met Valerie in 1981 and knew her well for the next nineteen years. I am lucky to own three of her paintings and enjoy looking at them everyday and thinking about her and Michael. Besides being a wonderful painter, Valerie was also an accomplished fiction writer. But she apparently decided in the 1980s to focus on painting, which she obviously excelled at.
Valerie was a committed and effective environmental activist. She was very involved in the successful fight to save the Kaiparowits Plateau from coal mining. This led to the creation in 1996 of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Val had a great sense of humor and could crack jokes with the best of them. I especially enjoyed her loud laugh. I also admired her outspokenness and willingness to challenge authority, a task particularly difficult when she lived in southern Utah. She was fearless. Her death is a great loss.
Jim Aton
Georgia B. Thompson
March 22, 2024
I met Valerie when the Cohen´s lived in southern Utah. She was a passionate, interesting woman with strong opinions and a desire for action and she spoke her mind. She had such a sharp way to look at issues and to note what concerned her. I appreciated her energy, study and research in our League of Women Voters group. I always enjoyed seeing her art work and after the Cohens moved to Nevada, spending time with them periodically when they traveled this way, was always informative and enjoyable.
Susan Sink
March 21, 2024
I feel so privileged to have been in Yosemite with Valerie, but particularly in the Bristlecone pine forest which she recorded in their tenacity and stark beauty, life wrapped around death as the green bristles made their way around the sand-colored trunks and branches. And I deeply admired her for her activism the year I knew her in Reno. - Susan Sink
Ursula K. Heise & Jon Christensen
March 21, 2024
Jon and I love Valerie's paintings and drawings, and we loved seeing her draw among the rocks and trees. We'll miss her - as will the bristlecones. Attaching a photo of a stay in the White Mountains in September 2019.
Donna Roff
March 21, 2024
Donna Roff here-I met Valerie 15 years ago when we bought our june lake cabin. Somewhere along the line she mentioned her book about her mountain climber mother and that she had grown up in Pasadena. So did I! I bought her book and enjoyed it thoroughly, not only her story about her mother but glimpses of old-time pasadena. I remember Valerie being surprised that I had read it, but she understood the connection for me. Her book -one more accomplishment in her long list.
Thomas Patchen
March 21, 2024
I did not know Valerie personally, and only interacted with her through email a couple of times few weeks ago about a painting of hers which I found online and loved immediately. When I discovered the price, I let Valerie know it was beyond my budget, and thanked her for her time. She responded by saying she wanted me to be able to have the painting - that it would make her happy to know it went to someone who loved it. She graciously accepted what I could pay for it... and Michael shipped it to me while Valerie was in the hospital. I was so sad to learn she passed away and will think of her kindness to a stranger when I look at the beautiful landscape above my fireplace mantel. Sincerely - Tom Patchen / Birmingham, Alabama
Nancy Fiddler
March 20, 2024
Valerie and I enjoyed spending time walking together in the mountains. We walked, we talked, we looked at things. Valerie knew so much. We sometimes went to favorite off the beaten path places in Tuolumne Meadows, a place we shared a love for. Other times we would take our dogs and wander on the Eastside or around Tioga Pass. There is a day I hope to remember always. Coincidentally, we both had middle aged dogs who had been diagnosed with cancer. We loved these animals, and knew that they would not live into old age. We decided that day to take the dogs to Saddlebag Lake and treat them to a boat ride across the lake, which was, of course, a treat to ourselves as well. My dog, Jenny, was in remission after some treatments, and had an all time great day swimming in the lakes and tarns in the 20 Lakes Basin and charging around with Valerie's dog, whose name I cannot recall. These dogs were living their best life on this day, and I was so very happy to be able to share the experience with Valerie, who fiercely loved all the dogs and cats she shared her life with. It was a bittersweet day, as I knew that neither of these dogs had much time, but it was comforting to share the day with Valerie. It relieved some of the sadness for me. Valerie was one of the most human human beings I have ever known and I am glad that she included me in her orbit.
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