‘This room is the reason we bought the house,’ says Eileen Cooper, of her studio in the Victorian villa in south east London where she and her husband have lived for the past 38 years. North facing, and stretching almost the entire width of the upper ground floor, it is a practical space, with a track of spotlights running across a moulding-free ceiling.
‘There was historical bomb damage so, conveniently, there were no original features I would have wanted to keep,’ she continues. Canvases are banked up and, on an easel, is a painting of a woman lying on an armchair, a baby on her lap reaching up to touch her face. It is a gesture both immediately relatable and reminiscent of Fra Angelico’s Madonna of Humility, a contemporary take on an age-old subject, viewed through the prism of a female gaze.
Eileen has never wavered in her devotion to figurative art, even when conceptual art was de rigueur. ‘I felt I didn’t have a choice – it’s like the nose on your face, you’re stuck with it.’ Bold outlines are married with expanses of flat colour, recalling the primitivism of the avant-garde, while her subject matter speaks of relationships, female sexuality, fertility and the practical balance of life, interwoven with elements of mythology and magical realism. A narrative ambiguity allows scope for interpretation and there is physical space, too. ‘Like a stage set, I only put in what is needed,’ Eileen explains. At the crux is her own life. It was the birth of her children that saw her start painting women as mothers. She worked when her boys napped and took to wearing ‘overalls and gloves so, as soon as they woke, I could be clean and ready to feed them’. Later, they painted alongside her after school.
Recently, Eileen has started working from life: the walls of her sitting room, used as studio overflow, hold paintings of her daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Two of her drawings – a self-portrait and a picture of her friend, fellow artist Cathie Pilkington (featured in the December 2019 issue of House & Garden) – have been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. A new body of work conceived in Suffolk, Somewhere or Other, was recently exhibited at Huxley-Parlour, W1. Additionally, Eileen has worked regularly in ceramics and is a consummate printmaker. This diversity makes for a fascinating career survey, opening this month at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery. ‘It has been so important to have a permanent space, where work in progress can be left without interruption,’ says Eileen, of the studio that has been the rhythm keeper of the decades.
Eileen Cooper’s first major survey exhibition ‘Parallel Lines: Eileen Cooper and Leicester’s Art Collection’ will be held at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery from September 10-November 27: leicestermuseums.org | eileencooper.co.uk
