Eileen Cooper has been hooked on mythological, folkloric, and biblical fables from an early age—the strange and fantastical tales serving as a strong influence on the paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures that form her admired oeuvre today.
As one of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists, known for her work’s figurative, assured, and totemic qualities, she shares a passion for the whimsical with Kit Kemp. “When Kit is looking for a piece, she knows exactly what she wants and is led primarily by color,” Cooper explains. “My paintings can be difficult to hang, but Kit pulls it off beautifully, surrounding them with detailing right down to the lighting.”
Before they met in person, Kemp had purchased one of Cooper’s paintings from a show, the acquisition leading to a face-to-face encounter. In a rather grand central London studio—which Cooper occupied during her seven-year tenure as the first female Keeper of the Royal Academy—they talked about art and design, with Kemp responding intuitively to Cooper’s work, showing an interest not only in paintings but the artist’s small bronze sculptures and linocut prints, as well. Since then, Cooper’s art has been woven throughout Firmdale Hotels’ intricately layered spaces. “A hotel is an interesting platform because it’s more relaxed than the intimidating surroundings of a gallery,” she says.
Nowadays, the down-to-earth British artist experiments and creates from three small studios, including one in south London and another in France. At the heart of her work is the figure of a woman rendered in many guises—lover, mother, goddess, heroine—yet always pulsating with life and energy.
In Cooper’s linocut series called Wildwood, hung in the Whitby Hotel’s Araminta Room, the female protagonists honor Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting who turns a man into a stag, and Daphne, who transforms into a laurel tree to escape the unwanted advances of Apollo. “In mythology, those were the stories I first fell in love with,” she says.
Cooper’s childhood was spent in England’s rural Peak District, the romantic landscape imparting a lifelong love of nature that survived her move to London at the age of 18. “A couple of my folklore bronzes speak overtly of wild nature, but even if it’s just a case of my figures having their hands in the earth, the symbolic association with nature is there,” she says.
Guests relaxing in the Drawing Room of the Ham Yard Hotel in London can study Cooper’s passion for nature in her Midsummer Night painting. Featuring two sleeping figures and a donkey, the allusion to Shakespeare’s play is not lost, but it is the depiction of autumnal nature and the suggestion of an active dreamworld enjoyed by the female subject that captures the imagination. Cooper thinks of it as “the end of something.”
Meanwhile, back at the Whitby, her Dancing in Solitude lights up a monumental space in the bar outside the screening room, its palette of blue, honey, peach, and ochre drawing particular attention to the female form of a dancing pair. “Kit still surprises me in terms of what she’ll pick when she comes to the studio,” Cooper adds, “but she always allows artists to be true to themselves, to their own roots.”
The Wildwood series in the Araminta Room at the Whitby Hotel celebrates Greek and Roman goddesses
