The red spot for ‘Sold’ has appeared beside most of Julian Cooper’s mountain paintings at the Art Space Gallery. ‘I’ve always managed to sell work,’ he said in a previous catalogue, ‘since I was a child. That’s the way I was brought up: seeing art not just as a cultural thing, but in practical terms.’ His mother was a sculptor, his father and grandfather painters. Indeed, this dynasty of artists based in the Lake District still does a brisk business in reproductions and postcards of his father’s and grandfather’s landscapes — and some of the originals, too — from the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere.
Julian Cooper studied at Goldsmith’s College in London in 1965–8 and, influenced by the times and by two of his teachers — the distinguished artists Albert Irvin and Basil Beattie — went enthusiastically abstract, before marking out a fresh territory for himself as a figure painter in the 1970s and 1980s.
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