Maker of abstract collages, watercolourist, poster designer and teacher, born in Souris, Manitoba, Canada. The family moved to Cardiff, Wales, when Cooper was six years old. He studied at the School of Art there, winning a scholarship to the Patrick Allan-Fraser School of Art, Arbroath, where he studied 1905–9. In London, in 1910, he attended evening classes under Innes Fripp at the City and Guilds School. After a period in Canada as a commercial artist and interior designer Fripp served in the Army during World War I, had another spell in Canada, returning to England in the early 1920s where he designed posters and began to paint seriously in the early 1940s. First one-man show at London Gallery in 1948; showed at Gimpel Fils from 1955; also exhibited at Galerie Craven, Paris.