Last year the painter Julian Cooper alerted me to the fact that he had a monograph coming out – The Art of Julian Cooper – now published by Unicorn Press. Although I’d lost touch with Julian, whose work I’d written about for magazines like Artscribe back in the 1980s, I was interested to see how his work had developed and so ordered a copy. We met when I was living in London, when my time was spent painting, teaching part-time to earn a living, raising a young family, and occasionally writing articles about, or reviewing, the work of painters who were committed to image-making; from Anselm Kiefer to Ken Kiff, Carol Robb, Andrzej Jackowski and Julian. 

I still remember a fascinating conversation in Julian’s studio about the way in which he depicted both natural and artificial light in the same painting. If I remember rightly, we were thinking at the time about his paintings Bella Vista Hotel (1982), Opera Square, Cairo (1983), The Farolito (1984) and Yvonne (1984).  In the late 1980s and early 1990s the focus of Julian’s work began to shift away from such figure-oriented images towards his present concerns, and he has gone on to be a highly successful painter of mountains and mountainous landscapes. I, by contrast, got a full-time teaching job, stopped writing art journalism and left London to run Fine Art at the University of the West of England. The trajectories of our working lives would appear, then, to have diverged to the point where it might seem presumptuous of me, having developed an “ensemble practice” in which making visual art now plays a minor if vital role, to reflect on Julian’s work. 

There are several reasons why I don’t think that’s the case, not least our shared interest in what, broadly speaking, might be described as “landscape”. However, the one I want to pursue here is bound up with my long-term interest in the archetypal psychology of James Hillman (1926-2011), for whom an image is not what you see but the way in which you see (and make) it.  In the Introduction to this series of essays I referenced Hillman’s view that Self is ‘constituted of communal contingencies … of the actual ecological field’ where each of us is placed, with what all the elements of life there are doing. So that to find our Selves we must turn to those elements, both visible and invisible. It’s in the context of turning to the conjunction of elements both visible and invisible that I’m writing here.

While my various activities may seem to belong to an entirely different order of creative work to Julian’s paintings, that this is not the case is suggested by his observation, in the 2015-2023 section of the book, that he has started to see the Cumbrian fells with which he is so familiar in ways that are ‘freed from well-worn imagery’; that they have become ‘a receptacle of time and habitation, interweaving natural and human systems that are connected in hight and breadth’ (p. 226). This suggests that we have in common a commitment to, and engagement with, the imaginative facility Hillman refers to as notitia, the form of attention common to the creative practices of art, education, ethics and any meaningful conversation. To what Mary Watkins, in her essay: “Breaking the Vessels”: Archetypal Psychology and the Restoration of Culture, Community and Ecology’ calls a ‘careful attention that is sustained, patient, subtly stature presentations’ (in Stanton Marlan ed. Archetypal Psychologies: Reflections in Honor of James Hillman, 2008,p. 419). Neither a technique nor a methodology, this is, as she writes in Hillman and Freire: Intellectual Accompaniment by Two Fathers, a quality of ‘seeing through’ that is ‘never accomplished once and for all’, is ‘slow, observant, and participatory’. 

While it’s good to have the many excellent reproductions of Julian’s paintings – the visible products of his work – what really interests me about The Art of Julian Cooper is that it allows me to reflect on these in the light of their otherwise invisible background; Julian’s reflections that make up the bulk of the text, divided into a series of time periods. Those from 1979-1989 remind me, for example, that what we had in common was a sense that the orthodoxies of Modernism were exhausted, that become ‘institutionalised and fragmented, with a rather contrived “avant-garde”’ (p. 52). His text also reminds me of what I admired in the way in which he assembled the imagery that constituted the topic of his paintings; for example, the way in which the quiet introspection of the woman with the circular mirror in Opera Square, Cairo (1983) counterpoints the grandiosity of equestrian public statute. In the context of an art education too often dominated by the dogmas of Late Modernism, it became all-too easy to simply run an eye over a painting like Looking West, Scarfell (1988) and take it in “organisationally”, as a set of formal contrasts without engaging, as it deserves, with the richness and complexity of its topic. That is without engaging with its various elements slowly and with a sense of empathetic questioning. Consequently, it’s helpful to have Julian remind me that what I’m seeing is a landscape painting that, in addition to the figure, encompasses ‘Sellafield nuclear processing plant on the coast and that flat farmland’ between that coast and Scarfell Pike. Julian’s text links this view with the contrasting values, ‘the complexities and contradictions’ of a landscape that is imbued with the Romanticism that underpins the National Park, the workaday world of ‘ordinary farm life’ and the ‘industrial activity along the coast’; a complex image inflected with a degree of unease for those of us aware of Winston Churchill’s notorious reference to his ‘black dog’.  

In this way Julian’s text constantly brings to the surface the “invisible” elements that a too-rapid reading of the paintings might well skate over too quickly or simply miss. By providing some background and reflection on the circumstances that led him to make the series of paintings that respond to the murder of the Brazilian trade union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes – who famously said that he first thought he was fighting to save rubber trees, then to save the Amazon rainforest, and finally for humanity – Julian deepens my sense of the paintings engagement with the inter-woven-ness of these issues. This comes over with particular poignancy in his references to Mendes’ wife Ilzamar.

Perhaps because I am no longer engaged in “painting as such”, and because my long involvement in deep mapping has made the idea that any sense of a particular place is inseparable from a sense of its temporality, I’m not particularly drawn to the works predicated on Julian’s exploration of the ‘shared identity between the surface of a mountain and that of a painting’ (p. 101).

However, my interest and attention are very much reengaged by his discussion of the work made between 2015-2023. These reflect a sense of place that’s very familiar to me from years during which my family has spent summers in the North Pennines. I am at once engaged by Julian’s concern to attend closely to ‘an apparently uninteresting bit of fellside’ in what I take to be the spirit of Hillman’s notitia; becoming ‘aware of how much activity was actually contained there’ (p. 226), both “natural” and “man-made”. The paintings that result from this attention, which might all to simply be glossed as “quiet landscapes’ are, as Julian suggests, anything but. He rightly sees them as a tacit reflection of, and on, ‘the question of how the same land can accommodate the demands of farming, water management and nature conservation, and how human and natural systems can co-exist at all’ (p. 268). 

This is much the same vital question that ultimately animates, albeit in a more overtly political context, Madeline Bunting’s extraordinarily perceptive Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey (2016) and that George Monbiot so singularly failed to do justice to in Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2013). It’s a question that might not immediately come to mind standing in front of one of Julian Cooper’s recent paintings. So the particular value of The Art of Julian Cooper lies, for me, in the way the painter has allowed us to attend to what lies within the immediately visible surface of his paintings.