Johnnie Cooper: The Listener
Paintings 2019–2022
Following on from Johnnie Cooper’s two other publications from Black Dog Press, Sunset Strip (2019) and Fractured Light (2020), The Listener centres on the most recent major body of work by the British Abstract artist. Inspired by Walter de la Mare’s brooding poem The Listeners (1912), this beautifully-presented book brilliantly conveys the power of Cooper’s monocromatic collection of paintings. These works serve as a meditation of the lived experience and the rich atmosphere of the artist’s rural surroundings. The Listener documents an important shift in Cooper’s practice, in tone—texture and also material, with the introduction of industrial bitumen paint. Overall, the paintings, which were executed at night time, bring a darker and more abstract emotion to the fore, confirming Johnnie Cooper’s current status as one of the most diverse and important British artists working in the UK today.
The body of work to which this book is dedicated, is heavily influenced by Walter de la Mare's famous and haunting poem, The Listeners. Here is an excerpt from the poem:
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
· Johnnie Cooper is one of the most distinct and important British artists working in the UK today
· Johnnie Cooper’s third book with Black Dog Press
· Inspired by Walter de la Mare’s brooding poem 'The Listeners' (1912)
· Documents a shift in Cooper’s practice in tone and texture, using industrial bitumen paint
· Cooper lives near the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire
Johnnie Cooper (b.1950, Wolverhampton) spent his early years in Saint-Eustache, a suburban town near Montreal, Quebec, where he
was immersed in Native American visual culture, before returning to the UK in 1960. In 1970, he studied sculpture at Staffordshire
College of Art, which was convened by the renowned cosmopolitan sculptor, Stuart Osbourne. Further postgraduate study followed at
Bretton Hall, Yorkshire, where from 1976 onwards he was mentored by Sir Peter Murray CBE, Founder of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP). Cooper exhibited in the inaugural YSP exhibition alongside Henry Moore and BarbaraHepworth.
This opportunity led to media exposure and served to launch his career. An intense period of formal experimentation ensued, leading Cooper to turn to painting in 1984. His first paintings were exhibited at the Crucial Gallery in Notting Hill, London. Cooper has worked in art education throughout his career, appointed as Head of Art at Bredon School, Gloucestershire and lecturing at Oxford Tutorial College. In 2004, he was invited to lecture on European Romanticism for the Art History department at Kellogg College, Oxford University. In 2007, Cooper spent three months in Shanghai working as artist in residence and cultural ambassador for Oxford International College.
Over the past half century Cooper has shown work internationally, from Dallas to Shanghai, and his work features extensively in countless important private collections. He has exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Free Painters and Sculptors Society, Manchester Academy of Fine Art, and Mall Galleries; and in 2019 the Saatchi Gallery presented a major survey of more than 50 of Cooper’s paintings and sculptures, exhibited in London for the first time in 30 years. Cooper continues to investigate the formal and conceptual limits of painting, developing new processes that reprise motifs of his early sculptural practice and reflect his love for the natural landscape.
