Julian Cooper was born in Grasmere in Cumbria in 1947 and studied at Lancaster Art School (1964-65) and Goldsmith's College of Art, London, (1965-69). He moved back to the Lake District in 1975 and although he has been based in Ambleside ever since, he is widely travelled and his rich expressionist, semi-abstract paintings have been strongly influenced by time spent in such far-flung places as the Peruvian Andes, Mont Blanc and the Himalayan mountains.

In November 1999, Julian Cooper, also a keen mountaineer, travelled to Kanchenjunga in Nepal. At 28,208 ft, it is the world's third highest mountain after Everest and K2. He returned with a series of studies on large canvases made on the spot in front of the mountain, which have served as source material along with photographs and recollections from memory, for a group of larger and more reflective canvases done in the studio. As such, they deal as much with the conceptual activity of painting as with the naturalistic depiction of place, and hover tantalisingly on the edge of abstraction.

The result of this approach is to go beyond treating mountains as objects and to make statements about the intensity and beauty of the physical world, and to convey the sense of awe that we all experience in the face of nature's elemental forces. The small realistic studies may capture a superficial likeness, but not a deeper psychological one. The studio paintings on the other hand blend images of an outer world of reality with an inner world of sensations, feelings and memory to achieve images that heighten the experience and that are truer to the idea of the mountain. Dr Robert Woof, the Director of the Wordsworth Trust who mounted a small exhibition of the painting late last year says: "Julian Cooper's new paintings, even for those who know the work well, will be a surprise. They present questions at once audacious and celebratory."

The son of William Heaton-Cooper, the quintessential watercolour painter of the Lakeland National Park, and the grandson of the Post-Impressionist landscape painter Alfred Heaton-Cooper he is the youngest member of a dynasty inextricably linked to a tradition of mountain painting.