Cooke was born in Cheshire, England in 1931. Although born in England, the artist lived in Jamaica and Bermuda as a child before his family eventually settled in his mother’s native America in 1947. There, he studied art history and biology at Harvard. After a brief period living in Ireland (1954-1955) during which he held his first solo exhibition, academic curiosity took Cooke to Salzburg to train at Kokoschka’s School of Seeing, under the Kokoschka himself.
Although the artist made Ireland his base, he enjoyed extensive travel around the world, visiting Borneo, New Zealand, Jamaica, Malaya, Lapland, Cuba, Cape Cod, Mexico, Russia and Madeira among other destinations. All these experiences are deeply engrained in his work.
Cooke is primarily celebrated as landscape artist, with his semi-abstract composition incorporating sculptural elements and material offering a unique take on the genre. His landscapes are transcendental, both in representation and subject matter. Landscape imposed itself as a motif, its cycles of death, change and decay offering constantly inspiring cycles of transformation. Cooke saw it as his duty to document, account for and transcribe these primal philosophical experiences through the depiction of blossoming vegetation, and remains and carcasses. The artist has also produced some striking nudes that celebrate the human form without idealising it, and he was also a prolific part-time sculptor, as his Perspex bone boxes – mainly produced throughout the 1970s – illustrate.
Poets and authors were among his frequent collaborators and supporters. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney praised his style while British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes shared Cooke’s elemental, almost metaphysical, fascination for nature.
Cooke’s contribution to landscape painting has been celebrated through three major retrospectives: at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin in 1986; at the Haags Gemeetemudeum, The Hague, in 1992 and the Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Perpignan, France, in 1995. He represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1963, and his works have entered the permanent collection of numerous high-profile institutions, such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Ulster Museum, Belfast and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in addition to those mentioned above. The artist received the Martin Toonder Award in 1987.
Cooke passed away in 2014 in Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow, Ireland.
