Julian Cooper lives his life on a grand scale, a life of monumental adventures to match the scale of his awe inspiring paintings. And now a book, appropriately monumental in size and scope, brings just acknowledgment of his work and, it’s hoped, an even wider audience for this artist who is Britain’s foremost living mountain painter.
The Art of Julian Cooper (Unicorn, £40) is a personal reflection on a life spent looking for places that carry a particular charge for the artist, finding them in some of the most inhospitable places on the planet. And it illustrates that throughout his journeys, searching for a fitting way to paint the world, he has experienced the life-long power of one place – the English Lake District.
Julian’s background made him what he is today
Julian was born into an artistic dynasty whose members are synonymous with the Lakes, their fells and mountains and waterways. The Heaton Cooper family tree is a pictorial essay on the development of art in the Lake District and beyond, and at its heart is the Heaton Cooper Studio, established by the landscape painter Alfred Heaton Cooper in 1905. Alfred (1863-1929) was recognised as one of the finest Victorian painters of his generation. The present building in Grasmere was opened by his son, Julian’s father, William Heaton Cooper in 1938. Julian’s mother was the sculptor Ophelia Gordon Bell, (herself the daughter of the animal painter Winifred Gordon Bell). The studio is a hugely popular tourist attraction, with around 90,000 visitors each year.
Julian studied at Lancaster School of Art and Goldsmiths’ College of Art in London, and in 1969 he was awarded the Boise Scholarship which enabled him to travel around Europe and visit many of the great art collections of France, the Netharlands and Italy. Back in England he lived and worked in London, returning to the Lake District in 1975 and since then he has developed an international reputation as one of the most imaginative and thought-provoking mountain painters of his generation.
His search for places with distinct characters took him all over the world
He has spent his working life looking for places that carry that “particular charge” for him and he’s found them in some of the most barren and inhospitable locations on the planet: Amazonia, Andes, Himalayas, Tibet, Tasmania and Carrara in central Italy. His influences at art school were mostly, he says, “post-painterly abstraction and colour field painting”, later becoming interested in the abstract expressionists. During the 1980s and 1990s his work ranged from narrative paintings based on Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, to paintings based on Wim Wenders’ film Paris, Texas, and a series of paintings about the events surrounding the assassination of the union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes in Brazil in 1989.
He then went on to find new subjects among mountains, working in the Alps, the Cordillera Blanca in the Peruvian Andes, Kanchenjunga in Nepal, and Mount Kailas in Tibet. More recently he has concentrated on studying the landscape within a twenty mile radius of his home in the northern fells of the Lake District, becoming increasingly fascinated with the interplay of nature and culture, the working landscape past and present. He exhibits regularly in London, and in recent years he’s had a number of exhibitions on home territory at the Heaton Cooper Studio’s archive gallery.
His exhibitions are testimony to the lengths he would go to for a painting
One of these was Among Mountains, an exhibition of ‘hardcore’ paintings of some of the world’s greatest mountain ranges, and covering 25 years of his life and work. They were all the result of his own adventures as a painter of mountain landscapes, fraught with danger and risk. On one occasion, working from a base camp on the Andean watershed, he carried 40 tubes of paint, a 7x6ft canvas and its alloy frame another 1000ft higher to his working site on a moraine edge. For five days he fought against the altitude to make a painting while seracs cracked off, stones fell, glacial dust was blown up from the cliff below, and cracks started appearing in the ground behind and in front of him. “Slicing off like salami, the earth eroded right up to my canvas,” he recalls. He decided it was too dangerous to stay.
Another recent exhibition, Inherited Landscapes, was truly a family affair, featuring the work of Alfred, William, and Julian who chose four paintings by each artist and was filmed making the selections for a Channel 4 TV documentary. “This family has been around for three generations dealing with the same landscape,” he says. “But our way of looking at it has changed over time, and with it different temperaments and differing attitudes to painting, which influence how we see the natural world.” For generations the paintings and books by Alfred and William have influenced the way the landscape of the Lake District has been viewed, and the studio is recognised as one of Cumbria’s most distinguished galleries and the pre-eminent centre for landscape art in the Lake District.
His paintings are large, Julian is unassuming and modest
Unlike his paintings, many of them more than two metres wide and with a presence that dominates rooms, Julian Cooper is an unassuming man of modest character, with the wiry build of a climber and an ascerbic sense of humour. I’ve known him for a decade or so, and have three prints of his work on my own walls, two of them – Reading the White Goddess and The Drinker, Langdale – featuring people as well as mountains, something his father and grandfather rarely did. In fact, Julian’s wife, the artist Linda Ryle, is the model in several of his paintings. They moved together from London back to the Lakes, initially renting a cottage at Rydal in 1975. “This change of location coincided with a growing conviction that I needed to escape from the constraint and likely dead end of abstraction and move towards painting from observed reality.”
He also supports other artists
The book brings us page after page of powerful images, and an accompanying autobiographical text which gives a rare, authentic and accessible account of the circumstances behind the artist’s work and follows Cooper’s development as a painter. But in recent years Julian has also fervently fostered other artists, curating shows of their work in the Grasmere archive gallery, a catalogue which highlights his own appreciation of so many different art forms.
In a foreword, his good friend Melvyn Bragg writes that “Julian is following the Wordsworth line and looking into the heart of things….At a time when the Earth itself is becoming increasingly and intensely familiar to us with television and photography. At a time when so many are understandably anxious about its continued health and well-being, its variety and fecundity, Julian has aligned himself with one of the truly vital subjects of the moment…..
“He has given us work of quiet magnificence and infinite subtle variety which will hang in many Galleries in the future as the context and creative framework of our lives.”
