Tag: Eileen Cooper

Eileen Cooper (b. 1953, Glossop, UK) brings a bold, expressive clarity to painting, drawing and printmaking, creating images that centre the female figure as a site of intuition, agency and imaginative transformation. Her work unfolds through a distinctive visual language—lyrical lines, saturated colour, and forms that feel both archetypal and deeply personal. Figures appear in states of balance, embrace, flight or quiet introspection, moving through symbolic landscapes that echo myths, dreams and everyday rituals.

Cooper’s approach bridges emotional immediacy with formal discipline. Her compositions often pivot around gesture and touch, using the body as a conduit for themes of care, desire, creativity and metamorphosis. Patterns, animals, foliage and architectural elements recur like recurring motifs in a private mythology, shaping environments that are at once intimate and theatrical.

As the first woman to serve as Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, Cooper has played a pivotal role in British art education, championing experimentation and material fluency. Across her practice, she treats image-making as a form of storytelling—one that honours vulnerability alongside strength, and that invites viewers into a world where symbolism, sensuality and inner life rise to the surface with confident, painterly force.