It has been said that to honor someone best who has passed is to craft a remembrance of them as they lived — in all their color, vibrance and black-and-white finite detail. A sketch, a painting, a doodle expressing the intricate beauty within a soul.
Continue reading Scene Around: For the Love & Art of Cooper Ley
The headline really should just say “The R-FH Area Sunday,” as Sunday seems to be the day for all events R-FH area related.
Continue reading The R-FH Area Weekend: St. Pat’s Parading, Partying & Art 
“We’re captive on the carousel of time … We can’t return. We can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the circle game …” ~ Joni Mitchell
The news hit his nimble-footed, intricately painted-and-penned world like a sledge hammer. Thirty-year-old Thomas “Cooper” Ley had died. He was my best friend’s beautiful boy.
The wound left by the merciless hammer’s mark was a deep one. Somehow it didn’t break the circle, though. It wouldn’t. Never could. That was the consolation, so I was posthumously reminded by his mother, if there was to be any at all in something that seemed so senseless and unfair.
Circle. It was stuck in my head. Once that hammer hit, she started whispering to me as I grappled with how to remember him best for her, for his family, for his friends, with my words.
Continue reading Cooper’s Legacy: The Art of Circle Gaming Among Childhood Friends“You gave no one a last farewell, nor ever said goodbye. You were gone before we knew it, and only God knows why. A million times we will miss you. A million times we will cry. If love alone could have saved you, you never would have died. In life we loved you dearly, in death we love you still, in our hearts you hold a place no one else can fill.”
It is with tremendous sorrow that the Ley family announces the unexpected passing of Thomas Cooper Ley on Jan. 11 — a beautiful soul taken too soon.
Continue reading In Memoriam: Rumson-Raised RFH 2011 Grad, Artist, Skateboarder, Musician, Thomas ‘Cooper’ Ley, 30
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