Rosamunde Copping

Biography

I was born in 1967 in London and moved to a small village in Cambridgeshire when I was 8 which had a profound effect on the way I observe a sense of place. Missing the diversity and cultural circus made me reflective and joining a small but jolly community in a flat land with huge skies made me expressive and curious. I like people and places and am fascinated by the habits and values that living forms display in different places. I spent a lot of time as a young person in the pubs and clubs in Cambridge and following an Art Foundation Course in Cambridge I went on to study Graphic Design and Illustration at Newport in Gwent and then on to an MA in Birmingham focusing on Illustration and Print-Making and specifically reportage Illustration of ordinary people. I had 3 sons in my 20’s, who I adore, and trained at Cambridge University to become an Art Teacher. I am passionate about Art Education being playful and fun and the engagement with practical Art within the community. I enjoy travelling especially to the North; Norway and Iceland and am enchanted by the North Sea. Having taught young people from 11 to 19 for more than 20 years I have recently moved to the North Norfolk Coast to focus more fully on continuing and developing my own understanding of how people live, and how I can record times places and memories. I spend my afternoons and evenings out and about walking with my Husband or on my own catching ‘glimpses’. I think of myself as very lucky to have been able to draw and paint all my life and earn my living by being creative and practical. My work is about routines, time and memory and how the significant episodes in daily life are hung on the frames of routines and rituals we construct. The back drop of a physical environment is subject to change as time passes however in our memory places can stand still. In the most recent paintings I have used the real recorded shapes that were the result of the sea eroding some of the Sea defences in East Runton late last Autumn which were later washed out to sea in the Spring storms. The Edges of the holes were like crafted silver and as such I used them as a precious frame for a playful group of family figures on remembered warm beach days against the beautiful surface of erosion. Collaged paper is used at the edge of the hole to disturbed the oil pained surface.