Description
Cooper was born in Ayr, Scotland and initially studied painting at Hospitalfield School of Art. He won a painting scholarship to Edinburgh College of Art, though these studies were interrupted by the war.
Cooper first flirted with pottery on a portrait commission in Iceland, and returned to England to set up a pottery studio in the village of Porlock, Somerset in 1950.
Henry Rothschild (1913–2009) gave Cooper a one-man show at his craft gallery Primavera in August 1955. Often compared to contemporary London based studio potters Coper and Lucie Rie, Cooper’s rural lifestyle meant that he was largely isolated from London trends. Cooper stated, “I met Lucie Rie and Hans Coper in the fifties and felt a very strong kinship with the direction their work was taking, in so far as it was concerned, as was mine, with sculptural form and texture, and was light years away from the Japonaiserie of the Bernard Leach school of pottery.”
In 1957 Cooper moved to the nearby hamlet of Culbone, where he re-established his pottery. He remained at Culbone for 25 years, before moving to Penzance in 1982.
Waistel Cooper’s ceramics are in the collections of many prestigious public institutions and galleries including the Victoria & Albert Musuem London, Stedjelik Museum Amsterdam, Manchester City Art Gallery, Glasgow Museums, Paisley Museum & Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, Newark Art Gallery U.S.A., Royal Museum of Scotland, Portsmouth Musuem, Leicester Museum, Dundee Art Gallery & Museum, Bristol Museum, Cleveland Craft Centre, Aberdeen Art Gallery.
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