Night Lane Green

Barrie Cooke’s fondness for the elemental transpires in his poetically deformed painting. Although born in Ireland, the artist studied art history at Harvard University in America before training in painting at Kokoschka’s School of Seeing in Salzburg. Despite returning to and settling in Ireland, Cooke has widely travelled and embraced cultural and artistic diversity in all its richness. Borneo, New Zealand, Jamaica, Malaya, are some of the destination the painter has been inspired by. Though primarily a Landscape artist, Cooke has also produced some striking nudes that celebrate the human form without idealising it. Fond of Nature and its elements, the painter adopts a fluid – aquatic – approach to depiction, one very much present in Night Lane Green. The artwork conveys incredible depth thanks to its overlaying colours, the smoky greys and blacks parting over a luminescent green. This depth seems lit up from within, as if something or someone was about to emerge at the surface. The engendered chromatic contrast structures the image and becomes the perfective focus, Cooke aptly engaging the viewer through mystery and composition. Abstract yet narrative, Night Lane Green is a beautiful example of how abstraction can toy with storytelling.