Meet the Artist: Marcus Cope Paints What Words Cannot Hold in London

Marcus Cope paints at the threshold where memory mutates into myth. A figure crouches before a colossal mask, its hollow mouth disgorging a rope into darkness. Nearby, a winged presence leans inward, reading by the dim glow of fire. Elsewhere, children gather before ruins, their gazes fixed on shadows taller than the walls.

These are not dreamscapes for their own sake but urgent allegories. In Nurture (2024), Cope fuses paternal intimacy with inherited trauma, staging care against the burning shadow of his own father — a scene of generational reckoning transfigured through love. In Surrender (2025), innocence collides with ideology as children crouch beneath the weight of authoritarian power. In Unity (2025), fractured figures gather in fragile togetherness, hinting at the possibility of repair.

His touchstones span from Kahlo’s raw vulnerability and the defiant urgency of Richter and Golub, to haunted darkness in Goya’s Black Paintings and the naked emotion of Guston’s late canvases. Yet Cope’s vision is unmistakably his own — forged from autobiography yet resonating far beyond.

At the heart of his practice lies persistence. Paintings that once seemed finished often call him back years later, demanding to be re-entered, reworked, given more time. In Cope’s hands, painting resists easy closure; it insists on its own life, its own duration.

With “Come to Think of It” (ARTUNER at The Bomb Factory, London, 19–23 September 2025), Cope invites us into this terrain of irresolution and reflection. Each canvas demands slow looking, asking us to dwell in contradiction rather than resolve it. Urgent, unflinching, and deeply humane, Cope’s paintings remind us why painting still matters: because it can hold what words cannot — grief and hope alive in the same frame.

Ahead of the exhibition, Whitewall sat down with Marcus Cope to discuss the personal histories, artistic lineages, and urgent questions that drive his work.

Marcus Cope on Canvas as a Mirror

WHITEWALL: You often balance studio life with family life. Does time away from painting feed back into your practice?

MARCUS COPE: Time away from the studio can sometimes be as important as time in it. Over the weekend, for example, I was busy with my ten-year-old daughter and everyday things — the shopping, cooking, washing. Coming back on Monday, I realised I hadn’t thought about the work I left on Friday, and I kind of like that.

WW: You have an exhibition coming up, “Come to Think of It.” What does this phrase mean to you? It feels both colloquial and layered. How did the title come to you, and what does it open up for the works in this show?

MC: I think I heard it on the radio, or someone said it, and it stuck with me. I’d been thinking about calling the show “Think About It,” because I do spend a lot of time thinking about my paintings. I wanted to convey that they’re not just visual — they develop in ways that take time, and that’s how I hope they’ll be viewed, too.

But “Come to Think of It” felt more like an invitation: come and look, come and think. I like phrases that already exist in the ether.

I often bring a painting to a stage where it needs something — and that something doesn’t come through paint but through thought. I have to figure out the resolution for the problem I’m facing. The title reflects that moment: the pause for reflection before resolution.

“Every canvas insists on its own life, its own time,”

-Marcus Cope

WW: You’ve described your process as responsive rather than planned. How does that unfold in the studio, and when do you know a work has reached resolution?

MC: I think of it as a conversation with the painting. There is some planning — an idea germinates in my mind and refuses to leave until it develops into an image, a sketch, and sometimes insists on becoming a painting. But once it’s on canvas, it changes: I’m no longer dealing with the image in my head but with a real, physical presence. I have to get to know it, to add and subtract, to search for references — often from Cyprus, where many of my works are rooted. One painting even took me back there to photograph a specific place.

Resolution, for me, is a balance of ingredients: content, composition, colour, and surface. By surface, I mean the mark-making — whether the canvas carries the history of its making. Some works I’d documented and stored later called me back; I reworked them radically. They kept their essence, but I couldn’t leave them alone. That persistence is part of painting’s nature: it resists easy closure. Every canvas insists on its own life, its own time.

WW: Moving on to themes: memory, inheritance, and family seem to surface throughout your work. How do these enter your paintings? Are they consciously introduced, or do they emerge unexpectedly in the process?

MC: I’m a real fan of specificity — everything in a painting is there for a reason. That’s part of what makes painting difficult: you’re aware of your limitations, of what you’ll allow yourself to do, and you’re always pushing those barriers.

For me, the family element comes from what I’d call a stolen childhood. I was sexually abused by my dad for about seven years. For much of my twenties and thirties, I wouldn’t let myself think about childhood at all — I shut out the idea that there were happy memories. When I was 35, my daughter was born, and that was when things shifted. I was forced to face what I hadn’t wanted to face in the fifteen years since I’d last seen my dad. Soon after she was born, he died.

I found myself struggling with moments that should have been magical: being called “Daddy,” bathing my daughter as a baby, or having her fall asleep on my chest. Those should have been pure joy, but for me they were emotionally complex because of my past.

What changed everything was realising that I could create new memories with her — ones grounded in love, safety, and presence. At first, these appeared almost incidentally, in the form of small drawings of her or our cat that I slipped into paintings of my studio. But gradually the impulse became more deliberate: I wanted to confront my own history directly, to register not only the fragments of daily life but also the deeper emotional reckoning that shaped them.

So yes, my past informs my art. But the most important part is hope. My daughter inspires me every day, and she’s in several of my paintings. She gave me the chance to rewrite my story — to be the father I never had. That sense of love and responsibility now shapes both my life and my practice.

WW: That’s incredibly powerful. Has painting itself changed the way you carry those memories?

MC: Yes, absolutely. Painting allows me to transform them — not to erase, but to turn them into something else, to create space where grief and love can exist together.

Fatherhood in Nurture

WW: Are there particular works you’d especially like me to mention?

MC: I was thinking of Nurture.

WW: Could you tell me about that work?

MC: That painting essentially shows me breastfeeding my daughter while standing on my dead dad, who’s on fire — a symbolic composition. Obviously I can’t breastfeed, and you can’t literally stand on someone who’s burning, but that combination felt right. It captured the intensity of those experiences.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I shouldn’t depict myself breastfeeding until my wife pointed it out. She said, “I went through that experience, Marcus, and you didn’t — you don’t know what it’s like.” And she was right. But for me, I had my own experience — and still do — of nurturing my daughter. Representing myself in that way felt like the most direct way to express it. My aim was never to diminish her experience, or anyone else’s, but to articulate the urgency and intensity of nurture as I live it.

WW: Nurture foregrounds a profound expression of paternal love, which is not often depicted so openly. How has that experience of fatherhood entered your daily life?

MC: I’m the guy at the school gate amongst all the mums, and it’s surprising — you think the world is changing, but it isn’t. There are still far more mothers at the gate whose work life seems less prioritised in their families. For us, it has always been important to do things 50-50.

Painting from the Inside Out

WW: Domestic interiors in your paintings often shift into dreamlike or uncanny spaces. Where do these environments begin for you — memory, imagination, or somewhere in between?

MC: They’re memories, but memories transformed. Most of my work depicts landscapes and exterior scenes. In this show there are only one or two interiors, like Secrets (Rest My Head), which reimagines my childhood bedroom. I remember the small details — the curtains with clouds, the toys, the posters. But it was also a site of trauma. Through painting, I’ve been able to replace those memories with new images, ones that focus on the surrounding details and recast the atmosphere. For me, painting is about turning pain into something else — into colour, form, and presence.

Unlike my landscapes, which often draw on photographs, the interiors are built entirely from imagination. That’s why they can feel uncanny — they’re memory and invention layered together.

WW: ARTUNER often speaks about “slow looking.” Does that resonate with you — either in how you work, or in how you hope people encounter your paintings?

MC: Completely. Painting is a private, intimate endeavour — you sit alone in the studio, making decisions that no one else can make for you. The works leave eventually, but the process is slow. Some paintings take a year or more. I often set one aside for months before returning to it. That layering of time becomes part of the work itself.

It makes sense, then, that the viewing should also take time. If a painting took me a year to resolve, it shouldn’t be something glanced at in five seconds. In a world that moves so quickly — at art fairs especially — painting can offer a counterpoint: stillness, reflection, endurance.

For me, each painting is its own journey. It needs its own resolution, which can’t be borrowed from another work. That singularity is what keeps the practice alive. The rush to produce — whole exhibitions in a year, shows that mimic retrospectives — can flatten that. I want each work to feel distinct, considered, and capable of standing the test of time. In that sense, painting resists the instant: it insists on its own duration, and that’s where its power lies.

WW: When you think about the history of painting — or even other fields like literature or film — are there particular influences or references that feel close to your practice? And when symbols appear in your work, do they come from imagination, or are they drawn from outside sources?

MC: I’ve been thinking a lot about my generation. I was born in 1980 and came of age in the 1990s. Richard Linklater’s Slacker epitomised that decade’s drifting energy — young people suspended between purpose and inertia. Films like Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and Clerks celebrated that same sense of disenfranchised youth.

That atmosphere of “aimlessness” shaped me. At school I only took two A-levels, leaving myself long stretches of time. I thought of myself as lazy, though in hindsight it was more about unhappiness and uncertainty. A pivotal moment came during Art Foundation, when tutors literally threw my portfolio out the door and told me: “We can’t deal with you until you start really making work.” It was harsh, but it jolted me awake.

By the time I arrived at Chelsea, “provisional painting” was everywhere — artists like Michael Krebber putting two colours on a white canvas and calling it freshness. It was almost as though effort itself had become unfashionable. I resisted that. In my twenties I worked obsessively — sometimes a painting a day. Around then I read Émile Zola’s The Masterpiece, which follows Claude Lantier, a painter striving endlessly in 19th-century Paris. That tension — between the quick, provisional gesture and the pursuit of a lasting “masterpiece” — still underpins my practice.

In more recent years, I’ve turned inward. Frida Kahlo was transformative: her ability to turn private pain into imagery gave me permission to mine my own history. Daniel Richter and Leon Golub also shaped me — their work carried the anti-authoritarian resistance I felt growing up. But I’m constantly drawn back to Goya’s “Black Paintings,” which I first saw at the Prado at 30. They hit me like a bolt — the darkest, strangest works of their time, painted on the walls of his house for no one but himself. And Guston remains a touchstone. At the Tate Modern retrospective last year, I broke down in front of Couple in Bed and Sleeping. The weight of those canvases, made at the very end of his life, hits with a force that’s impossible to escape.

And influences now often come from outside painting: Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer struck me with its raw vulnerability, just as Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle mirrored my own experience of growing up with an alcoholic father. These days, my influences don’t come from studying brushstrokes — they come from literature, film, memory, and life itself.

The Weight of the World

WW: In Surrender, there seems to be an engagement with authority — or perhaps the resistance to authority imposed on children. How do you see that dynamic?

MC: Authority can be fraught. Just this past weekend, there was a right-wing march in London. My daughter and her friend are only ten, and I was struck by how one could be oblivious while the other was already beginning to understand that there are people who thrive on hate. That tension — innocence colliding with ideology — is something I think about a lot. 

WW: How do you approach values within that tension?

MC: What worries me most is how children are caught in the contradictions of the messages around them. That’s where painting can step in. It isn’t prescriptive, but it can hold a space for reflection — for working through complexity and ambiguity.

“It can hold a space for reflection — for working through complexity and ambiguity,”

-Marcus Cope

WW: As you move beyond this exhibition, are there questions or images you feel drawn to explore next?

MC: It’s hard to ignore the state of the world: wars, ecological collapse, animal welfare. I’m vegan, and the way humans treat animals shocks me. Wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and governments remain tied to oil. These realities weigh heavily on me. Many of my paintings emerge from that space — from holding grief and resistance together. Surrender may be rooted in a specific memory at the Cyprus College of Art, but I hope it speaks universally: children surrendering while powerful men wreak destruction.

There are always works in progress. Some I’ve wrestled with for years, painting over and starting again. One is based on a man I met in Cyprus who kept jars of pickled snakes as a bitter reminder of women he resented. That encounter has haunted me, and I’ve been trying to resolve it on canvas. Another draws on a work by the British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun that hangs above my bed, combined with a memory of someone setting themselves on fire.

But not everything is darkness. One painting in this show, Watch Them Grow, depicts my wife watching our daughter from a distance. For me, it’s the most hopeful work here. I’m always conscious of including different registers — light as well as shadow. I’m not a “series” painter; each work is its own journey. That uniqueness is what keeps the practice alive — and, I hope, relevant for the future.