Frank Roper (artist)

Frank Roper was born 12 December 1914 in Haworth, Yorkshire. He studied at Keighley Art School (meeting his future wife, Nora Ellison) and the Royal College of Art, London, where he was a student of Henry Moore. In 1947 he became a sculpture lecturer at Cardiff College of Art, later vice principal until 1964. He retired from the college in 1973 "to be free to play my own games". Many of Roper's early commissions stemmed from the need to repair places of worship after they had suffered bomb damage during World War II. He went on to become one of the most prolific of all post-War artists undertaking church commissions. His major commissions included work for Llandaff Cathedral, Roper also created engraved and stained glass, for example at St Peter's Church, Chippenham. Two BBC television programmes were made about Roper, one in 1964 ("Mind into Metal – Frank Roper, Sculptor") Two of Roper's works are in the collection of National Museum Wales: St Michael and the Devil and Horse. Roper was awarded the MBE in 1991 for his services to art. He died at the end of 2000. The "Frank Roper Centre" opened in February 2019 at the Church of the Resurrection in Ely, Cardiff; a permanent exhibition of Roper's life and works. ==Lost-polystyrene casting in aluminium==

Roper was one of the first sculptors to adopt the lost-polystyrene method, almost always casting in aluminium, perfecting the technique in 1964. It is now used widely in manufacturing (known as lost-foam casting). Over his career Roper worked in wood, stone and bronze, His work for Christ Church in Roath (1964) may have been his first commission using the lost-polystyrene method, a casting process recognisable by the texture of the metal, as the pitted nature of the expanded polystyrene remains visible. Having his own home foundry also kept costs down and allowed for a very direct relationship with the finished work – "conception, creation and casting became one continuous process" he told the Church Times in 1994. working in East Anglia. The Canadian sculptor Armand Vaillancourt as well as Alfred M Duca, a sculptor and research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are also noted to have been the first to cast in this way. ==Stained and etched glass==

, Pembrokeshire Roper has stained glass or etched windows in over twenty churches in Wales and England. His wife Nora, an artist in her own right, influenced the colours The cast aluminium incorporated within the designs often added further depth and dimension. Roper's window depicting the Resurrection in St Mary's, Talbenny, Pembrokeshire, one of three in that church, is an example of his use of small chunks of knapped glass fixed to the surface in order to catch and disperse light. == Ecclesiastical works ==