Stan Cooper (1915-2010)

Stan Cooper was born in London in 1915. After leaving school he worked in a laboratory for Siemens and attended university part time but couldn’t afford to take the exams.  A lifelong pacifist (& later a Quaker) he was a conscientious objector to WW2 but carried out his service as a market gardener.  After the war he became a youth hostel warden moving around locations in the South of England and ran a shop with his wife.  Money was very tight for Cooper and his young family but eventually he was given the chance to train as a teacher, which is where his passion for art arose.  The family moved to Staffordshire in 1959 for his first teaching post teaching art and outside of school he began to make his own art.  After retiring, Stan moved to Suffolk in 1979 where he began to concentrate almost entirely on printmaking, specifically linocut. Having never gone abroad, and not seeing the point of it, he was gifted a trip to France for his 70th by his daughter.  This one trip changed his whole attitude as he fell in love with the French way of life, and he continued his visits annually until his wife’s death in 1996.  His subject matter focussed on either the local landscape or scenes of provincial France.  His technique of producing prints from a single block of lino, progressively cut away, produced results which are delicate of line and bold of colour.