The Art of Julian Cooper
Monday 16 March to Saturday 18 April 2026
Mezzanine & Circle Levels | Free Entry when the theatre is open, check our opening times: Your Visit
Theatre by the Lake is proud to present JULIAN COOPER, an exhibition of original works. Running from Monday 16 March to Saturday 18 April, this free-entry exhibition takes place across the Mezzanine and Circle levels.
Julian Cooper was born in 1947 in Grasmere, Cumbria. His 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). His life has inevitably intersected with the wider currents of mountaineering and mountain painting.
MORE ON THE ARTIST AND HIS WORKS
Julian studied at Lancaster School of Art (1964-65) and Goldsmiths’ College of Art (1965-69). Awarded the Boise Travelling Scholarship (1969), he travelled in Europe and was resident at the British School in Rome (1969-70). He returned to the Lake District in 1975 and has developed an international reputation as one of the most imaginative and thought-provoking mountain painters of his generation. He now lives and works in Cockermouth.
Cooper has spent his working life looking for places that carry a particular charge for him and has found them in some of the most barren and inhospitable places on the planet: Amazonia, Andes, Himalayas, Tibet, Tasmania and Carrara.
His influences at art school were mostly post-painterly abstraction and colour field painting, later becoming interested in the Abstract Expressionists, seeking to negotiate a way through the representation-abstraction dichotomy, and to combine the surface-image relationship he found in the work of Clifford Still and Mark Rothko whilst retaining the vitality of a representational image.
During the 1980’s and 1990’s, his work ranged from narrative paintings based on Malcom Lowry’s novel “Under the Volcano” to paintings based on Wim Wenders’ film ‘Paris, Texas’, and to a series of paintings about the events surrounding the assassination of the union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes in Amazonia 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.
He currently finds new potential within a twenty-mile radius of his home in the northern fells of the Lake District, becoming increasingly fascinated with the visible interplay of nature and culture – the working landscape past and present – acted out in plain sight on the land.
The uplands have become a contested landscape, and there are philosophical, economic and political questions that challenge our notions of this much-written-about and painted region, and of who has primacy there.
BOOK LAUNCH & TALK — WORDS BY THE WATER
THURSDAY 12 MARCH | 1PM
Julian Cooper in conversation with Marie Elsa Bragg, discussing The Art of Julian Cooper and a lifetime of painting the Cumbrian mountain landscape. Published by Unicorn Publishing Group. Keep scrolling down to the event listing.