In the 1930s, when she was still in her early twenties, Suzanne Cooper was one of the rising stars of British art.  Mary Kisler, Senior Curator at the Auckland Art Gallery, NZ, where one of her paintings now hangs, compares her work to that of Eric Ravilious and Christopher Wood.

Her work has been overlooked for decades, but now at last with an exhibition scheduled to open at Printroom on Sunday 3rd June and running until the 8th July- this forgotten figure of British Modernism is set to receive the recognition due to her.

Suzanne Cooper grew up in Frinton, a seaside resort on the Essex coast.   In 1935, when she was nineteen years old, she became a student at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, where she was taught by the master print-makers Iain Macnab and Cyril Power.  Over the next four years she exhibited her oil-paintings and wood-engravings at the Redfern Gallery, the Zwemmer Gallery, the Wertheim Gallery and the Stafford Gallery, and with the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Print-Makers (founded by Henry Moore in 1930) and the Society of Women Artists.

Fourteen of her paintings remain in the possession of her family.  At least a dozen more were sold, most of their current whereabouts being unknown.  One was bought by the influential collector and patron Lucy Carrington Wertheim and is now in the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, hanging – fittingly – alongside paintings by Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood, who was an important influence on her.   Another was sold at Bonhams Auction House in 2004 and bought by the then Director of 20th Century Paintings at Christie’s.

Suzanne Cooper’s career was cut short by the outbreak of World War II.  The Grosvenor School closed in 1939.   She married Michael Franklin in 1940.   They had three children, and she produced no more large-scale paintings, though continuing to work in pastels and chalk.    She died in 1992.

The prints that are for sale through printroom studio are a second edition, authorised by the artists family and printed by Phil Abel of Hand and Eye press in an edition of 45. They are numbered but are not signed. Each print is authenticated by Dan Franklin, the artists son.

All the prints can be bought framed individually in black with a white archival window mount for an additional £45.00 +postage and packing. Please email info@printroom.studio for further details

Claire Willberg is a sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in London and Suffolk. She graduated as a sculptor from the Royal College of Art in 1989 and subsequently completed an MA in printmaking at Camberwell College of Art. For the last six years she has been a member of the Slaughterhaus Print Studio in South London. She has exhibited widely in the UK and in 2016, her work was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Her work takes inspiration from observing, collecting and recording the discarded objects she finds abandoned on city streets. Through a range of traditional processes including intaglio, relief and screen-printing these found objects adopt new characters and become identified by their shape and interaction with colour rather than any previous function or use. Sitting together the imagery plays with a combination of forms and textures that are recognisable to us but always on our peripheries.

Michael ‘Misha’ Goro was born in St. Petersburg, Russia where he received his B.A. in architecture. In 1990 he immigrated to Jerusalem, Israel where he discovered intaglio printmaking and began to use it as his main medium. In 1993 he moved to the U.S. and completed his education, receiving M.F.A. in printmaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his current capacity as a chair of the Graphics Department at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, he has been developing the programme and teaching in it for the past eight years. His works can be found in private and public collections worldwide and have received a number of prestigious international awards in Japan, Korea, China, Europe and the USA.

He describes his art as a “continuous creative search for raw authenticity in urban environments and human forms that are constantly changing.” Utilising the full spectrum of printmaking techniques, ranging from Renaissance engraving to digital photogravure, he shares his unique personal experiences through imaginative imagery.

Ian Chamberlain is a Bristol based artist whose work takes influence from manmade structures.Ian has a long standing fascination with technology and architectural forms. The work aims to reinterpret these manmade structures as monuments placed within the landscape. These structures in turn then become monuments of their time. The prints serve as a visual historical document and record.

The structures in studies are devoid of people and the architectural scale can no longer be based on the physical measurement of the human body. The specific  use of etching allows these layers to be seen bringing an emotive quality and response to the work. The etchings aims to become a visual experience of the subject of the subject being worked on and changed at each state. The states are different comments, a journey of recording the object.

Projects in the past have included Goonhilly Earth station, The Lovell Telescope, Cheshire  Maunsell sea forts in the Thames estuary and the Acoustic Sound Mirrors  on the south Kent coast.

Ian has exhibited nationally and internationally,he is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Sarah Duncan is an artist printmaker who lives and works in Bristol. She studied Textile Design and then spent 10 years working within the Art Department in feature films. More recently she passed her Masters degree in Print with Distinction at UWE in Bristol.

Sarah’s work is based on the natural world, and has recently focused on both the cosmos and the sea; she is inspired by our relationships with the remote and inaccessible. Sarah is fascinated by phenomena which appear on the surface to be constant and uniform but on further inspection reveal themselves to be unique, constantly in flux and ever changing. She is influenced by forms and light invisible to the naked eye. Sarah’s practice aims to embed the humanly experienced physical world into the unimaginable enormity of the cosmos. It shares the central aims of science in trying to make sense of the natural world, but focuses on an emotional and embodied response rather than just an intellectual one.

Sarah seeks beauty in the realms of science, astronomy, and microscopy. Optical technology and scientific research allow us to glimpse the unseeable.  Her work reflects on these technological revelations, and tries to grasp what would be unknowable without them. Sarah’s printmaking revels in time and speed, abstracted by telescopes peering into the deep past or microscopes delving into hidden worlds.  Her most recent residency was at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona. Throughout history the night sky has been a screen for our projected dreams.  Her work seeks to reflect this screen, and to find others to illuminate.

All of Sarah’s prints are hand printed using traditional printing methods including etching and lithography.

I love the strong contrasts and tactile qualities inherent in etching and lithography. For me, printmaking is an extension of drawing, a fundamental means of expression, and I see a clear analogy between the processes I use and my subject matter.

My work is based on a series of journeys to distant places to study the natural environment and its wildlife. My most recent work is based on two specific locations : the most Southern coast of Africa at Hermanus and the landlocked northern rainforests of Laos.

Water is an important and re-occurring motif in my work. I am enthralled and excited by the energy and dynamism exhibited by its movement across the Earth’s surface. I like to depict waterscapes in a state of continual physical transformation, of stasis and flux, creating vivid juxtapositions of light and form, which reflect the rhythms and cycles of the natural world.

I hope to convey the essence of the experience by stripping away superfluous narrative and allowing an audience to attribute meaning and relevance based on their subjective memory and experience.

“a beautiful conflation of Japanese minimalism and western abstraction”  Neil Cameron The Scotsman

Jenny Smith is a contemporary artist living and working in Edinburgh. Her work invites us to question the definition of drawing, re-visiting modernist concepts from a contemporary digital perspective. She draws, using meditative, repetitive hand rendered processes. These are then developed into unique large scale drawings or limited edition prints using the digital medium of laser cutting and etching. This work investigates the relationship between process and concept, within the context of memory, place and time.

Jenny currently creates socially engaged, site-specific work, often derived from people’s hand written answers to a question, which are then laser cut into paper, or other materials, whilst maintaining the integrity of the original writing. This work explores writing as a form of drawing and often incorporates the use of social media and new technology within the process of collecting answers. Work is often commissioned on a large scale for specific spaces or created as signed, limited edition prints, framed for the domestic or corporate environment. Jenny also creates artist books and films. Her work is available for commission and exhibited and sold through a number of Galleries in the UK. Exhibiting nationally and internationally, Jenny has won numerous Awards and has work held in public and private collections, including acquisitions of her artist books by The Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. She was a recipient of a Scottish Arts Council Creative Research and Development Award and has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

“Danielle Creenaune’s work occupies a liminal zone between abstraction and representation, where the experience of a place, rather than a literal rendition of landscape feeds her creative practice. Wind-swept and gestural, the artist distills the essence of her subject through reductive marks made confidently on lithographic plates, which through the alchemy of printmaking are released onto paper.” Marguerite Brown MA ArtCur, General Manager Print Council of Australia Inc.

Having lived abroad for the last 18 years, Australian born artist, Danielle Creenaune, worked out of her print studio in Barcelona and since 2019 she returned to live in Australia in Wollongong NSW. Her central motivation “is the intrinsic dialogue between landscape and people, how landscape is perceived through our library of pre-lived experiences and the ways in which this is reflected through the visual language of gesture.”

Her work has received numerous awards internationally including the René Carcan International Printmaking Award 2016 1st Mention in Belgium and the Corsair Prize for Innovation at Inkmasters Cairns 2018. Her lithographs were selected to represent Australia in the International Print Triennial Krakow 2015 and her book ‘When the Sea Wakes Inside You’ was exhibited in the 250th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition London 2018. Creenaune’s work is held in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia.

She completed a Bachelor and a Master of Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1997.