TV appearances for artist Julian Cooper

We are very proud that the Lake District artist Julian Cooper is to feature on two TV programmes this summer.

Julian, a key member of our family team here, will be seen painting in the Lakes in a show presented by explorer and broadcaster Paul Rose.

The Lakes with Paul Rose will be shown on BBC2 next month. Viewers will see Julian at work painting the Bowder Stone in Borrowdale.

Also this summer, More 4 will screen an episode of The Yorkshire Dales and the Lakes, which will feature Julian at his studio in Cockermouth, painting Rannerdale Knott from the shore of Crummock, and choosing paintings for a new exhibition of his family’s work at our Heaton Cooper Studio. Both his father and grandfather were eminent painters of the Lake District landscape.

Last summer an exhibition devoted to Julian’s work was the first to be shown at the re-opening of our Archive Gallery here in Grasmere.

It followed two other big events which marked the artist’s 70th year. A London exhibition, Upstream, ran at Art Space Gallery, and in Kendal, the Abbot Hall Art Gallery showed more than 30 monumental paintings from his extensive output and reflecting the artist’s travels.

Julian’s father, William Heaton Cooper (1903-1995) was a successful painter of the Lake District, as was his grandfather, Alfred Heaton Cooper (1863-1929), and his mother was the sculptor Ophelia Gordon Bell (1915-1975). You can see examples of their work if you visit us.

Julian studied Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in the late 1960s. In a career spanning three decades, his work has ranged from narrative paintings based on Malcom Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano to a series of paintings about the assassination of the Brazilian union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes in Amazonia, in 1989.

His more recent work has been concerned with the many and diverse human attitudes to mountain landscapes worldwide. In 2001 his Mind has Mountains exhibition at the Wordsworth Trust and in London showed paintings made after an expedition to the Kanchenjunga region of Nepal; noticeable was an absence of sky and a concentration on selected areas of terrain.

His solo exhibition Cliffs of Fall in 2004 at Art Space Gallery showed work based on a comparative study of the North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland and the Honister Slate Mine in the English Lake District.