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View more works by James Cook
The landscape painting of James Cook are in the tradition of American landscape painting going back to the earliest of our country. But Cook’s paintings are not repetition of those earlier works; they are uniquely his own and are part of the world of today, stated and presented in the artist’s own dramatic and deeply felt terms. The paintings also are a consummate demonstration of years of hard work, of looking at and, literally, inhaling the landscape and then rendering it in a sure and dramatic way. These are the paintings of an artist totally in control of his medium and totally sure of what he does. IN them he achieves that elusive goal for which all artists strive: he realizes his personal artistic vision in dramatic and uncompromising terms when he presents that vision to us and we comprehend the meaning of intent.
Cook’s paintings clearly support the artist’s position. They are broadly painted landscapes, seascapes and urban images based on what the artist has seen on his travels throughout the United States. But even if the subjects were from a different country, they would still be affected by the artist’s unique American vision. And this is what makes Cook an American artist.
As an art student in the late 60’s at Emporia State University in Kansas, Cook refused to succumb to the dominant minimalist and abstract art popular with both the faculty and students at that time. Instead, he adopted the realist vision which characterizes his art today. By his own statement—and it is a true statement—he also remained influenced by 20th century European art from Cubism on as being antithetical to his own aesthetic point of view.
For anyone familiar with the history of art, Cook’s paintings are a rewarding study in sources. In his large landscapes both in terms of scale and subject—the American wilderness—there are suggestions of the work of America’s great 19th century landscape painters, Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. Cook’s seascapes with their powerful crashing of surf on rocks are clearly indebted to the work of Winslow Homer. The artist’s more intimate forest interiors, on the other hand, relate to the so called American Barbizon painters such as Dwight Tryon. Cook is also indebted to developments in 19th century European art, particularly to the work of the great English painter, J.M.W. Turner and to the French Impressionists. No artist of talent can fell any shame in acknowledging such sources which have exerted and continue to exert powerful influences on many American artists. Cook’s “urban” (the artist’s term) or “industrial” landscapes have their source both in terms of subject matter and execution in Turner’s very similar themes, which are simultaneously statements about modern life in the industrial age and about the possibilities of pure painting. Likewise, the broken color and textured surfaces of the Impressionists are to be found in Cook’s work as well.
There are other apparent influences on Cook’s work from the history of art (Frans Hals or Velasquez’s bravura brush for example). But this cataloguing of sources misses the point. Cook’s work is in no way derivative; rather, it is new and fresh and the artist’s unique expression of strongly held aesthetic views. Tradition is important to Cook even if he resists application of that term to his work. The artist has learned a great deal from the art of the past both in terms of subject and execution. He exults in being part of that tradition, in the skills it has taught him, in the intellectual directions it has led him. But he has not let it dominate him. Cook has looked to the past for stimulation, not as an end in itself.
Cook’s landscapes and seascapes may owe a debt to a Cole or Church or Homer, but no one can confuse his view of nature with theirs. His view is very contemporary, one we all share, one that is far from the theatrical idylls or constructions of the 19th century. Likewise, the artist’s urban landscapes, related s they are to Turner, provide Cook with a similar opportunity to make his own statement about the world around him and to deal with painting as painting, with color, with movement, with surface and with the feelings and states of mind these can create. And it is not the Impressionists’ vision of the world that interests Cook. Rather, it is their technique of painting, their broad brush, broken color and concern with surface that Cook adopts and adapts to his own work and which allows him to make his very personal statements.
Cook is a painter who is in love with painting, with the feel of paint, with its smell, with its application, with its movement on the canvas. He paints quickly creating richly colored and exciting surfaces. Indeed, his bravura use of paint is akin to the abstract expressionists; unlike them, however, he provided the viewer with a recognizable reality, ordered by his own personal vision and controlled by his technical mastery. In subject matter and the interpretation of that subject, Cook’s is an American vision which owes much to tradition, but it is a tradition that is, in the artist’s hands, fully redefined taking on a new, personal, but very important meaning.
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Born in Topeka, Kansas
EDUCATION
BA 1969, MA 1970, Emporia State University, Emporia, KS
Wichita State University, MFA, 1972
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1980 Frumkin & Struve Gallery, Chicago, IL
1984 Arizona Biennial Exhibition, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ
1985 Midwest Realists, Paine Art Center, Oshkosh, WI
Watercolors and Drawings, San Francisco Museum of Arts, San Francisco, CA
1986 Springfield Art Museum, Springfield MO
1988 Wilson Art Center, Rochester, NY
“The Persistence of Romantic Landscape in American Art”
1989 Hearst Gallery, St. Mary’s College, Moraga, CA
1990 Boulder Art Center, Boulder, CO
1992 “James Cook, New Paintings”, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ
1993 Kennedy Galleries, New York, NY
1994 “In the Spirit of Nature” Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, ID
1996 “Plain Pictures, Images of the Prairie”, University of Iowa, Museum of Aty
1998 “Garner Tullis: Art of Collaboration” Associated Artist’s of Pittsburgh
1999 “Poetics of Place II” Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho
2000 “Works on Paper”, Jan Cicero Gallery, Chicago, IL
2001 “Reinventing the Landscape IV”, Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum
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