FOLLOWING on from his monumental Abbot Hall Art Gallery retrospective and a major London show at Art Space, Julian Cooper is back in the frame with the last in a trio of exhibitions.

Completing his hat trick, Full Circle sees towering artistic talent Julian return to home turf at the Heaton Cooper Studio for another glimpse at many of his past paintings.

The Heaton Cooper Studio at Grasmere was opened by Julian's father, esteemed painter William Heaton Cooper, in 1938.

It was in the new studio there in 1969 that William put on the first exhibition of work by son Julian who had just graduated from Goldsmiths Art College.

Almost 50 years later, Julian's work will be the first to be shown at the reopening of the studio's Archive Gallery.

The Grasmere exhibition, which runs throughout the summer, includes previously unseen work covering a range of time and subjects. Among the pieces featured are urban scenes set in different European cities from the 1970s and 1980s, and some of the recent paintings from his London exhibition, Upstream.

Julian studied fine art at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in the late 1960s. In a career spanning three decades, his work has ranged from narrative paintings based on Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano to a series of paintings about the assassination of the Brazilian union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes in Amazonia, in 1989.

His more recent work has been concerned with finding a relevant contemporary language for painting mountains and rock. In 2001 his Mind has Mountains exhibition at the Wordsworth Trust and in London showed paintings made after an expedition to the Kanchenjunga region of Nepal; noticeable was an absence of sky and a concentration on selected areas of terrain.

His solo exhibition Cliffs of Fall in 2004 at Art Space Gallery showed work based on a comparative study of the North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland and Lake District's Honister Slate Mine.

Julian's father, William (1903-1995) was a hugely successful painter of Lake District vistas, as was his highly revered grandfather, Alfred Heaton Cooper (1863-1929).

Julian's mother was the sculptor Ophelia Gordon Bell (1915-1975), one of the most distinguished sculptors of the 20th century.

Born in London in 1915 and brought up among the artists of St John’s Wood in London, Ophelia was equally at home in the Lakes where her maternal grandfather was vicar of Urswick, near Ulverston.

Perhaps her most celebrated work is the bronze head of mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary.

Full Circle runs until the end of October.

The Heaton Cooper Studio is open Monday to Saturday, from 9am-5.30pm; Sunday, 10am-5.30pm.

For further information telephone 015394-35280.