James Cook
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James Cook, White Mountains #1, Oil on Linen 70" x 108"

Biography James Cook

Cook is a painter who is in love with painting, with the feel of paint, with its smell, with its application, with its color, 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 provides 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 tradition that is, in the artist’s hands, fully redefined taking on a new, personal, but very important meaning.

The landscape paintings of James Cook are in the tradition of American landscape painting going back to the earliest painters of our country. But Cook’s paintings are not repetitions of those earlier works; they are uniquely his own and are part of the world today, stated and presented in the artist’s own dramatic and deeply felt terms. The paintings are also a consummate demonstration of years of hard work, of looking at and, literally, inhaling the landscape and 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 its meaning and intent.

Robert A. Yassin
Executive Director
Palos Verdes Art Center, 2001

James Cook, Warm Springs, Oil on Linen, 49" x 58"

Born
1947 Topeka, Kansas

Education
1969 BA, Emporia State University, Emporia, KS
1970 BA, Emporia State University, Emporia, KS
1972 MFA, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS

Museum Collections
Boise Art Museum, Idaho
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona
Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas
Rahr-West Museum, Wisconsin
Arizona State University Museum of Art, Tempe
Indiana University Museum of Art, Bloomington
University of Minnesota Museum of Art
University of Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City
South Dakota Museum of Fine Arts, SD
New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe
Museum of Contemporary Art, Osaka, Japan
Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson
Illinois State Museum, Springfield
State University at Albany Museum of Art, New York
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson
Yuma Art Center, Yuma, Arizona
The Ackland Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
Princeton University Collection, Princeton, New Jersey
Denver Art Museum, Colorado

Public Collections
Allied Bank of Texas, Houston, Texas
A.T.&T., New York, New York
The Bank of New York, New York, New York
Canadian Petroleum Collection, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Cargill Incorporated, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Chemical Bank, New York, New York
Continental Illinois National Bank, Chicago, Illinois
E.F. Hutton, New York, New York
Emporia State University, Kansas
Ernst & Whinney, New York, New York
First Bank of Evanston, Illinois
F.M.C. Corporation, Chicago, Illinois
IBM, Stuttgart, Germany
The Kemper Group, Chicago, Illinois
LaSalle National Bank, Chicago, Illinois
Mr. And Mrs. William Janss, Sun Valley, Idaho
Marsh, McClellan, New York, New York
Mutual of New York, New York, New York
Northern Trust Company, Chicago, Il.
NYNEX, New York, New York
Otis Elevator Company, Connecticut
Owens - Illinois, Toledo, Ohio
Pacific Enterprises Oil Company of Dallas, Texas
Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison, New York, New York
Piper, Jaffray & Hopwood, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota
The Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, New Jersey
The St. Paul Companies, St. Paul, Minnesota
Sears, Roebuck & Company, Chicago, Illinois
Sonoita Enterprises, Tucson, Arizona
Stephens, Inc., Little Rock, Arkansas
Texaco, White Plains, New York
Texaco, London, England
Texaco, Kyoto, Japan
Tucson-Pima Library, Tucson, Arizona
U.S. Tobacco, Greenwich, Connecticut
West Publishing, St. Paul, Minnesota
United Airlines, Chicago, Illinois
Bank of America, San Francisco, California
Ashland Enterprises, Tucson, Arizona
Yellowstone National Park Headquarters, Yellowstone, Wyoming

 

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