Meet Mark Cooney, an artist who will be featured in our 2025 Art Show & Sale. Mark is known for his poetry and paintings that beautifully illustrate and capture the unique nature found in Colorado.
Mark has lived in Colorado for 43 years, and in that time has learned a lot about the climate and landscape which he put into his book. He described, “It is neat you have so many different environments in such a small area, that’s what’s delightful about here.”
His art not only allows him to explore his interest in Colorado’s nature scenes, but it has helped him through the challenges of mental illness. “I compared mental illness to his big scary jungle with a bunch of dangerous things I couldn’t see, and my art and poetry was my machete to hack through it,” said Mark.
You can see Mark’s artwork on display at our 2025 Art Show & Sale! If you are an artist who wants to be a part of the showcase, just fill out our artist interest form by July 25th. Read more about his journey, as well as his poem about his experience below.
Mark’s Autobiography: “A Journey to, Through, and Recovery From Mental Illness”
Early Beginnings
I guess that from as far back as I can remember, I was kind of a ‘different person’. As a young boy in Fort Dodge, Iowa, I would explore our yard and neighborhood, catching insects and drawing them. I mainly stayed by myself and did not get involved in rough boys’ games like football and cops and robbers.
At age 7 my family moved to Sacramento, California, where I did similar, but there other school kids started to see me as retarded and by not having a tough nature, got bullied. Then between age 9 and 13, we went to an Indian reservation with mostly Indian children where I remained a ‘nature boy’. Despite the racial difference, there was actually little bullying there. I made friends in school, but otherwise apart from family and school, mostly stayed by myself.
At age 13, my dad got a civil service job at Fort Carson and we moved to the local area. In junior high, I was almost immediately seen as different and picked on. I also think I had undiagnosed ADD and didn’t have a disciplined attitude toward school work and behavior. By high school, I got serious, in general, toward good behavior and committing to school work. I was no longer picked on, but basically ignored. I was very shy to start talking to other students and was seldom reached out to. I was never athletically gifted so ‘jocks’ weren’t my type, and by personal values I refused to go to parties. I made good grades, taking ‘easy’ classes for the most part. However, homework took hours daily after school and I just could not hold a job also, like many other students.
After high school graduation I received a scholarship to Pikes Peak Community College and got good grades the first year. The second-year classes were more difficult, and I failed a couple of them. Then a third year I only took a few more credit hours.
By now I was very lonely for friendship. A couple of years ago I had joined a church with a youth and college group and now tried hard to make the first move for friendships despite my shyness. I made friends with one of the ladies there but it was always platonic and she also stuck to lifestyle I didn’t agree with. She also went away to a distant college during the school year. The next few years I tried to get into the work force but thinking back now already had attention deficit disorder and though I really tried to work my best, did not keep most of the jobs I got for long. I think with the years of stress feeling very lonely and lacking job, and academic success as well as lack of money,
Mental Illness Onset
In 1995 at age 27, something snapped in my mind, or rather I should say crumbled, as I went into a gradual descent into a mental hell. I had months before, quit my last job as a dishwasher as I could tell my mental focus to stay on task was falling apart. Through the year 1995, things got worse and worse. Getting dressed, bathing, riding the bus, became major obstacles. I became forgetful of basic activities of daily living and had to carry lists of those things to remember to do them. I tried hiding these problems from my parents, whom I still lived with, but by August of that year, they had called the mental health center to try to intervene.
It would take till April 1996 to secure Medicaid to pay for treatment for me. Once that cleared, I was so deteriorated I was immediately hospitalized. It ended up Luvox medication was prescribed for the obsessive compulsive symptoms I developed just to do normal tasks. For a few weeks it cleared up my focus. But then things deteriorated again and I was again hospitalized. But despite mine and my parent’s denial of me having psychotic and schizophrenic symptoms, I became medicated for these.
Nine days followed, I’m sure the worst of this whole journey of my mental illness. I was overdosed with Haldol into anticholinergic delirium. I virtually remember nothing of those days. My parents said I was semi comatose, close to death, and I did not recognize them or where I lived. The hospital staff where I was were not helpful and refused to call a higher up professional to check in on me. My father said after he threatened a lawsuit if I died, the hospital staff relented and called in the psychiatric supervisor, who diagnosed anticholinergic delirium, which is potentially fatal.
I was sent down to CMHIP in Pueblo to detoxify for 3 weeks. I came out OK physically, but not well on the psychiatric level. So started nine years of different hospital stays, multiple therapists, group homes, and endless psychiatric medications tried, few of them effective for long. And the treatment plans were still for schizophrenia. To this day I’ve maybe only experienced two or three of the 8 or 9 symptoms that should go with a schizophrenia diagnosis.
Breakthrough
In 2005 a breakthrough finally came! Pikes Peak Mental Health, as it was then known, had set me up with one of their older, more experienced therapists. Off the bat, she believed I was not psychotic/schizophrenic and soon suspected Adult Onset Attention Deficit Disorder. She recommended my psychiatrist try a medication for that called Stratera and to cut down on the antipsychotic medication. He agreed. Within weeks my mental focus greatly improved. She also did therapy connected to helping ADD. She had a sand tray she used for therapy, ( I believe originally for children having traumatic issues) with many miniature figures. We both soon learned it could help me regain living skills.
By miniaturizing a large sized task, like relearning to ride the bus, I could refocus on it through making maps in the sand tray. She also helped my self expression of life challenges through creative writing assignments. One example, I wanted to leave Colorado Springs to start a new life. I came up with the story of Chatty the Monkey, who ran into endless trouble leaving his monkey colony to go out on his own. My story made me reconsider my moving away.
So started the last 19 years of my life, in my therapist’s words, ‘rewiring’ my mind. I relearned my old bus routes to ride on my own again, like pre – 1995. I got back into painting landscapes, occasionally selling them along the way. My poetry, in the same way, reignited within me. In 2007 I obtained employment, a summer groundskeeping job with the old eastside K-Mart. During 2010 – 2016, I obtained employment through mental health services at Rudy’s Texas BBQ, first doing dining room upkeep, then washing kitchen dishes. I was steadily employed part time for 6 years there. I wasn’t the fastest worker but gave what I had, which my supervisors understood and appreciated. Through this time my art and poetry continued to grow.
Rudy’s employees commissioned my paintings, including the lead manager. Brookside staff commissioned other paintings from me. I did more brief jobs after 2016, including 6 more months at Rudy’s, but for much briefer lengths of time. In 2016, a poem of mine, “Front Range – Nature’s Irony” written in 1999, won an annual award through Pikes Peak Arts Council.
The last few years, like most people in the world, COVID 19 and its world effects, clotheslined me. But in 9 months of lockdown in assisted living, I created many new paintings and poems during that time in 2020 – 2021. I admired the generosity of a couple of local women professional artists who supplied me with free art supplies while I was on COVID lockdown.
Now post COVID crisis, I continue to find more creative outlets for my art and poetry. COVID lockdown has left some long standing negative mental and physical issues with me. I have not been employed since then, but still volunteer in the community, from dishwashing to teaching my poetry skills. I have developed a special friendship with a lady who attended my poetry class. I once taught at the Independence Center. I periodically find art shows to enter, most recently the TRE art show. In 2021 I self-published a book of 30 of my regionally centered poems and 10 images of my local nature paintings and titled it “Front Range – Perceptions of Delight”.
I still struggle with mental disability. I’ve needed the services of Brookside Assisted Living for 23 years. But thanks to artistic and poetic expression and one special therapist, I’m doing way better than say, 1996. I can say my life has evolved from despair to delight, delight in the healing world of artistic and literary creativity.
“Chrysalis” by Mark Cooney, 2012
A caterpillar
Like such I started life
As a fertilized egg
My birth, my hatching
I fed, mostly on the leaves of wisdom
And occasionally folly
So I went through a boy and teenager,
And young adult, collegian, and worker
At age 27, metamorphosis came calling,
For me, severe mental illness,
And I became a chrysalis
Still myself, but also partially mentally paralyzed
A frightening place, wonder how I survived,
But by God’s higher power, did
My artist, my poet intact
My personality persevered
Still I transformed there
I grew in compassion to those with disabilities
And 10 years later
That next change in form
One special therapist, the right medications converged
In my mind
Like a chrysalis transforms to butterfly
I emerged refreshed in mental function
I now take flight,
But with one weak wing
Still mentally ill,
I flutter erratically
To reach the social altitude
Of peers from my youth
Careers, degrees, families I may never have
But I try my best
Life’s not so much the height you reach in society
But in the effort to attain
The loftiest place meant for yourself
