Mouse climbing high

AN ARTIST’S STUDIO should be located somewhere conducive to the development of creative energies, after all the right working environment helps produce the work of a master. A more perfect location for work and life could not be imagined for equine artist David ‘Mouse’ Cooper, his studio found alongside Fakenham’s old Dewing and Kersley Mill with its tumbling brook that once powered the engines of East Anglian commerce.

On a quiet Sunday morning it is a scene reminiscent of Wind In The Willows; visitors wouldn’t be surprised to come across Rat, Mole and Badger arriving in their boat to pop around for a cup of tea, a slice of cake and for a private view of Mouse’s latest work.

The captivating location, the peace only interrupted by the bubbles from the River Wensum, merges Mouse Cooper’s life with his art, his house doubling up as his studio, the work from home mantra no need to be hoisted upon him by the onset of covid.

And although a proud equine artist, Mouse’s on-canvas ability stretches further than just painting and sketching the horse.

“Moving up here was a great thing it’s given me a lot bit more opportunity to paint. You know, learn about painting the coast,” he says, before adding realistically: “I think I’ve done financially well enough now to sit up and enjoy myself, but I don’t want to stop learning. I am always trying to learn still.”

In some ways Mouse’s route to life of a full-time professional artist is a long way from where he began as a fresh-eyed 16-year-old racing apprentice for Bill Marshall and Tim Thompson Jones, yet the horse is still at the heart of what he does.

And drawing and painting has always, or nearly always, been a driving force of his life, a talent that has always been available but something that has flowed and ebbed and flowed as life has progressed.

“When I was a kid, I was great at drawing,” he recalls, admitting that he was the “arty one” at school. “I used to draw pretty much from the early days. I used to draw on a wall, my mother used to tell me off, I was one of ‘those kids’. At school I did a picture of Foinavon winning the Grand National, it was one of the first portraits I drew, and my teacher put it up in the in a room and she loved it. It spurred me on. My father had a lot of racing books and things, so I used to copy works by John Skeaping.

Pre-parade, July Course

“By the time I got to 12 or 13, they said you can do the ‘O’ level, which I did, and then ‘you can do an ‘A’ level’ and I had to go to Goldsmiths College for that. I went down once or twice a week and I was mixing with professional artists and I think that is a massive thing; if in those early years to get to something sooner rather than later, it is a big advantage, it gives such a head start.”

At school leaving age in the 1970s Mouse had two options – follow an artistic path through art school or work in racing. With college courses not so available as now, expensive to complete (as now) and racing offering a chance for the teenager to get away from home and London, Mouse, who had learnt to ride at riding schools in the capital, took the route into an “old-fashioned” apprenticeship.

He served his time at Tim Thompson- Jones before a bullying incident, sadly not an infrequent occurrence in those lawless days in racing yards, led him to move to work for David Elsworth, a man whom Mouse still describes as “the best trainer and the best man I worked for”.

Mouse was with the recently retired Elsworth at Whitsbury through the golden years of the trainer’s career, working alongside horses such as Desert Orchid, Robin Wonder, Indian Ridge and Lesley Ann.

But, despite the good time had in Hampshire, and able to paint outside of working hours, for someone with his creative talent, the job, unsurprisingly, was not quite fulfilling Mouse’s needs.

“I decided to have six months around Europe with a rucksack on my back – I bought a rail ticket for £10, and then you could go in any train and anywhere that you wanted. It was fantastic.

“And I went to all the capitals, went to all the museums, and that’s when I really started to look at paintings and started to think you know, this is what I want to do.”

But the realities of following a route to life as an artist, coupled with the necessity of earning a living, meant Mouse did not immediately heed that calling; while painting in his time off, he was not ready make it a full-time career.

He returned to Newmarket and fell into the world of the jobbing jockey and stable lad, riding bad horses, doing the rounds around the different yards, failing to settle, finding little to motivate him, enjoying his working life in a racing yard less and less as the months and then years wore on.

Personal life led to change

IN THE END it was a personal event that inspired change. “I had relationship issues, she went her way and I went mine,” he explains. “I sold my house and used the money to go to art college. At 40! I went to Anglia Ruskin University started there and did a three-year degree.

“I thought ‘let’s throw everything in’; I realised that if I didn’t, you know, well, I was gonna to regret it. I wanted to reinvent my life.”

The degree led to a dissertation on the movement of the equine, with time spent at vets looking at tendons and bones and sitting up with foals, and realising that, although he had spent all that time working with horses, there were gaps in his educational knowledge and understanding of the horse.

Mouse has his own life mantra and this has been an important thread to finding his future.

“I’m not I’m not, you know, ‘a laughy sort of guy’, but I am an optimist and I will have a go. I will give everything a try and then I can decide whether it works or if it doesn’t work.

“The art had sort of bumbled along until then, and I think that’s what I am trying to explain is you can go through all of your life and think ‘I can’t do this now’.

“If you get an opportunity you have to take it. You might get one chance, you might get two, give it a go, because you don’t know where it is going to take you.”

He admits that the lightbulb moment came from a conversation with a ballerina in Paris [Edit: yes, you read that correctly].

“I was in a hotel I could hear this noise down the corridor so I went to investigate.

“There was this funny little blond girl stretching out and doing her exercises. She told me that she was a roller skater, but she was training to be a ballet dancer and was going to college.

“When we started talking I looked at her feet and her toes were all broken, and I could see she was quite physically scarred.

“It was a little bit like somebody who has been in racing; she was still fit but injured, too. She was strong and she was persevering, still pushing, and she was using all of her day’s 24 hours to achieve.

And he believes that someone like the ballerina could be an example to those working in racing now.

“You get up and you’ve got a whole day in which you could do something, do an awful lot more than sleep in the afternoon. Those working in racing could go and do an evening class, learn to become an electrician, a plumber.

“And it really knocks me out that so many just won’t go and do something, try and figure it out. You know just do something, learn and be prepared to go and do something.

“When you think about it there is a wonderful opportunity for people in racing, for some of them they ride out in the morning and they are done for the day.”

The artist is quite critical of the motivation that is generated within racing for people to want to do more both within and outside of the sport and job.

“I don’t think we’re getting through to a lot of people in life, especially in racing. I don’t blame anyone who wants to do their horses, great, as long as they’re happy. If their relationship is ok and they’ve got somewhere to live, and then they’re in as good a good position as anybody else in the country.

“But if you’re not happy, and you’re dissatisfied, and it’s getting you down, don’t go down the pub, don’t go take a load of drugs, have a go and try and do something and see how it comes out. And, you know, it might ignite something.

“But for many people a lot of confidence goes and self-esteem goes. I have had all of that. I think everyone goes through it, but I think it can kinda magnifies in racing.”

College led to a career change

For Mouse it was while he was at college that the dots really started to join up.

“I found that my talent was still there,” he says with candour. “I saw things and I went ‘Oh yeah!’, and ‘That’s what I thought!’. It just opened up my brain. And that was when I sort of started to think, ‘Right, you know what? You could make a living out of this.’.”

Turning that reborn talent into a commercial enterprise and one capable of keeping a roof over his head and food on his table was not immediate either, and Mouse dedicates that achievement to a long-standing friend.

“The vet Rob Pilsworth came up to me one day in Newmarket High Street and he said, ‘For God’s sake Mouse you’re not selling your pictures for enough money, you don’t realise how good you are!’

“He offered to take over all the management and now he looks after all correspondence, all phone calls and he basically manages 90 per cent of this.

“A lot of credit for this goes to Rob; we have known each other for a long time, but worked together for the last six years. He gets the commissions and enquiries and works it all out.

“David Fish of Ascot Gallery Conversation Pieces has helped me out, too, and it means I can get my paintings to Cheltenham and such places, I don’t have to spend the money on a pitch or anything like that.

“And generally people in racing have just been really nice – Amy Mania, Ryan Mania’s partner, she gets me things up north, and there are just so many people to thank. Hopefully, I do a good enough job for them all.”

At one with his work… nearly

AND WHILE the man is seemingly content with his life, perhaps it has taken this time for him to truly be at peace with himself, there is still much more that he wants to achieve with his work.

“I still don’t think I’ll ever quite pulled off the best thing!” he smiles. “I think the Tattersalls sale picture nearly is [see December 2021’s issue], but I am still not there yet.

“I guess it is the ‘Ronnie O’Sullivan syndrome’ – he is best player in the world but he doesn’t think he’s good enough. If you did it would probably be the wrong thing to do. I think that’s another thing I learned from racing – don’t get carried away with yourself.”

Since turning “pro”, he has also picked up some tricks of the trade of the professional artist.

“The whole thing is a cauldron of information, I’m interested in the mechanics, the parts of it that perhaps people don’t see, but you need little tricks, it is those little things I’ve learned.

“For instance, when you watch racing, and the horses come straight to you, you don’t really see much. The brain is trying to disseminate what’s happening and it can’t cope, there is too much information.

“The better point to see them and paint them is that three-quarters shot when they’re going away, that’s when you spend time looking at them.

“And if you look Munnings’ painting he gets exactly that point, it takes away a lot of detail, such as faces, but it still captures the movement. The brain retains that information longer.”

While commissions fill a lot of what Mouse paints on a commercial basis, there are works that he produces as just art for art’s sake.

“Every now and again, if I have an exhibition, I always put one or two pictures that I think will just get people talking and that I have no intention of selling. And I don’t I don’t care if they do or they don’t.

“I’ll hang a picture on Tuesday at my stall at Fakenham racecourse and people will say ‘Oh, that’s interesting’, but would they want to hang it on their walls? Probably not. Somebody might get ‘it’, but it won’t necessarily be a selling thing.”

The 61-year-old Mouse, understandably, has some regret that he came late to the world of the commercial artist, but there is a realisation that the previous “life” skills he learnt working in racing are standing him in good stead.

“Maybe I missed out 30 or 40 years of this, where would I be if I’d done this since I was 15?

“But I can set up my stall at the races, put up my pictures and I’ll have every sort of person come round. Somebody will say ‘I don’t like that! That don’t look like an ‘orse!’ , but I can deal with that, I don’t mind,” he assesses realistically. “I can deal with the rich, the famous, the poor, everybody; I think a lot of that has come out of racing.

“I just hope that I’ve gone another 10 or 15 years and I can keep going and I can keep finding and producing and doing something, looking for the next winner.”

So, on that peaceful Sunday morning, we leave the man by the riverside, surrounded by his paints and his brushes and with his aged dog; his equine masterpiece at the very tips of his fingers and just waiting to be discovered