Portrait Making with Eileen Cooper

It’s a bright Thursday morning in November and I’m dressed in an unfamiliar corduroy suit. In the taxi to Eileen Cooper’s south east London studio, where I’ll sit for the portrait that we’ve been arranging, cancelling and rescheduling since the summer, I think about what protracted psychodrama might unfold today.  

Many accounts describe sitting for a portrait as a charged, lengthy, uncomfortable experience. “Painting is a high-wire act,” Olivia Laing wrote after sitting for Chantal Joffe. Annie Sprinkle, the New York performance artist, compared being painted by Alice Neel to tantric sex. Sue Tilley, the subject of Lucien Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, recalls a grimmer experience: “As I lay there in agony, with a draft blowing on me from under the door, I really thought that I wouldn’t be able to bear it.” 

When a beaming Cooper greets me at the door, excitedly asking me whether I’ll get to keep the suit, I realise that I needn’t have worried. Cooper is generous and sympathetic and her portraiture matches her character. When I mention the draconian conditions that sitters for artists like Freud and Frank Auerbach – whose sessions one subject compared to a trip to the dentist – she laughs. “I’m too gentle for that,” she says, “I wouldn’t want anyone to suffer.” 

Cooper’s studio is a large room on the raised ground floor of her home, a Victorian townhouse that she has lived in since 1984. Here, she has set up an unfussy mise en scène: I sit on a camping chair in front of a large canvas that leans with its face to the wall. To my left is a blue-legged stool, on it a glass jug containing a bouquet of autumnal flowers with a single incongruous pink rose. When she’d asked me if I wanted to be pictured holding something, I had bristled, not wanting to force some symbolic statement. I’m satisfied to realise, as I sit down ready to take notes with my notebook and a gold-nibbed pen that I’m admittedly very proud of, that the decision had been made for me. 

Though Cooper has hosted countless sittings like this one, it turns out that I’m not the only one who was nervous: “Every time I have someone come, I want to cancel,” she says. “It’s a showdown, you know: you’ve got to perform.” Often, she confesses as she stations herself at an easel in front of me, she ends up extending the large piece of paper she’s working on in order to fit her subject’s feet. She’s determined to get me onto one sheet today.  

Part of the reason why her sittings are relatively painless is that Cooper’s portraits are drawn in pastel, a less lengthy endeavour than painting. She rarely spends longer than three hours with a sitter, taking photographs on her phone to return to during supplementary solo sessions.  

Our conversation meanders across weighty topics, career, money, family, with a pleasant levity. After an hour of back-and-forth, I almost forget that I’m there for anything other than a chat with a friend. When I glimpse her hand, stained dark blue from the pastel, I remember that there’s another version of me taking shape in front of her. Before we take a break, I help her affix a sliver of paper to the bottom of her sheet to accommodate my loafers. 

“With faces, I want to reduce their complexity, but to increase their meaning and intensity.”

Though Cooper has been working as an artist since the early 1970s, these portraits are a relatively new development. In 2017, when she was approaching the end of her tenure as the Keeper of the Royal Academy – a prestigious post that put her in charge of the Royal Academy Schools – she invited two of her students, Hannah Perry and Fani Parali, to pose for a series of 30-minute drawings.  

In the years since, many of her students and ex-students – from artists like Prem Sahib, Rachel Jones and Gabriella Boyd to the Tate director Gregor Muir – have sat for Cooper, some multiple times. Her offer is always the same, she says: “Come and help me, and I’ll try not to make it too painful.” Most of her early subjects were used to Cooper the teacher; in the studio, in her home, embarking on a new project, it felt like a certain boundary had been broken. She was more like a friend. Their conversations followed similar contours to ours, charting territory that their usual student-teacher dynamic mightn’t allow. “They saw me being much more vulnerable in the studio,” she says. “I gave a lot to them and they ended up giving a lot to me.”  

The portraits have transformed over time; today, they’re fulsome and colourful. When I ask Cooper whether she thinks she’s improved, she answers with the tenor of an artist who has seen her work, and the work of her students, shift and evolve ceaselessly over decades. You gain a lot with experience, she tells me philosophically, but it’s not a straightforward progression: “You lose things, too.” 

Cooper describes her earliest work as dark, psychological, sexual: “The painting of a younger woman.” Recently, an exhibition in London displayed a group of her drawings from the 1970s and 80s containing severe bodies contorted into violent tangles, invariably naked. In time, the work has softened: her characters’ expressions have become kinder and their gestures gentler. They float peacefully, clothed, rarely colliding as those in the early work do. Female bodies are still the primary subject of her non-portrait work, and they still appear folded into unlikely shapes (she never has trouble fitting someone’s full figure into these images, as she does with the portraits). 

Over the decades, and between the two distinct strands that have emerged in Cooper’s work, the way she paints and draws faces – simplistic, almost archetypal – has hardly changed. They’re the product of a slurry of art-historical influences, which she reels off instinctively: Italian Madonnas, Japanese prints, Indian miniatures, Romanesque art and Picasso. With faces, her goal has always been “to reduce their complexity, but to increase their meaning and intensity.” Indeed, the one that takes shape during my sitting could easily be related to the scrapping subjects of her early drawings. 

Towards the end of our session, Cooper starts referring to the portrait as “you”,like there are two of me in the room. There’s the one who will shortly walk downstairs to eat a bagel for lunch before going home and the one who will remain seated, pen in hand, for the rest of his days. I begin to feel uneasy, knowing that my pastel-rendered counterpart will go on to have an unpredictable life of his own; where will he end up? Will he be loved? Looked after?

Almost immediately, I realise that the same is true of the real me. Whilst my portrait remains sitting, suited, half-smiling as he chats with Cooper, I will go out into a world where anything could happen. I’ll receive bad news, I’ll embarrass myself, I’ll lose my hair; I might get hit by a bus. My drawing may well live longer than I do. As this existential spiral continues, it occurs to me that I might have been a little quick to believe that this portrait would be an entirely pain-free experience.