Guy Cobb

Guy Franke Cobb (born October 27, 1963) is an American artist born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States.

Career In 1983 Cobb left the University of Mississippi to join his older brother, Ty Cobb, as a co-founder of an acrobatic basketball show called the Bud Light Daredevils. The group invented the sport of acrobatic basketball and entertained audiences at NBA and college basketball games in North America, Europe, Asia, Israel and Australia.

By 1990 Cobb had relocated to rural Fair Grove, Missouri Cobb donated paintings to raise funds for WKNO Public Television and the Memphis Orpheum Theater and other works to hospitals and mental institutions. Cobb has donated more than 60 paintings to not-for-profit organizations and museums throughout the region. Cobb incorporated thick textures onto the surface of his paintings by squeezing the paints onto the canvas.

Palestine At his 2006 exhibit at Christian Brothers University, Cobb was introduced to Naseeb Shaheen, a Palestinian-American Professor at the University of Memphis. From this meeting Cobb would eventually donate two of his paintings to the Birzeit University Art Museum which Shaheen had helped to finance its construction.

Reception Art critics John Simmons and Camille Howell wrote: "Down in the Valley of Rural Violence is typical of what Cobb calls his 'thorn paintings'.....His use of tortured metal, abstract forms and an overlay of projecting thorns all combine in this and the other paintings in the series to produce statements of anger and frustration". "Guy Cobb is an artist worth watching. He could well become a real force on the regional art scene." "Cobb's works are unsettling, disquieting, and impossible to ignore."