James P. Cook

James Pringle Cook (born 1947) is an American painter based in Tucson, Arizona, known nationally for expressive, monumental landscapes and urban scenes that employ vigorous brushwork and thick, impasto surfaces and move between realism and passages of abstraction. He has explored a wide range of geographies across the United States and subjects from craggy mountains and seascapes to industrial accidents to the figure. Curators and critics, however, generally agree that his work is as much about pure painting as it is about his convincing recapitulations of the world and a sense of place.

Cook has exhibited throughout the United States and in Canada in more than seventy solo exhibitions, including shows at the Tucson Museum of Art, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art and Roswell Museum and Art Center, and group exhibits at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Wichita Art Museum, among many. His work has been featured in Arts Magazine, American Artist and New American Paintings (vol. 12, 24, 36), major newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Arizona Daily Star, Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Mexican, and television news features in Dallas, Phoenix and Tucson. In 1972, he took an Assistant Professor position at the University of Arizona, drawn to the region's geography, openness to representational work, and conduciveness to plein air (outdoor) painting. and Joslyn Art Museum, among many. He has been represented in New York City by Peter Tatistcheff; in Chicago by the Allan Frumkin, Frumkin/Struve and Jan Cicero galleries; and in Montréal, currently, by Beaux-Arts des Ameriques. Cook works and lives with his wife, artist DeAnn Melton, and family in Tucson.

Work Cook's work has been described as an individualistic, unpretentious "balance of realism, abstract expressionism and impressionism" —a designation somewhat borne out by artists he names as key influences: J. M. W. Turner, Manet, Monet, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, and Frank Auerbach.

James Pringle Cook, Morgan's Point (diptych), oil on linen, 78" x 192", 1995-6.

Critics have observed that Cook's uncompromising artistic vision and approach place signature works, such as Whisper #2 (2013) or Morgan's Point (1995–6), in a breach between cutting edge and traditional, and abstraction and realism, that transcends labels and welcomes "art conservatives and iconoclasts alike." Cook has stated, "the tension between the two poles [of realism and abstraction] has always been the thing that enlivens my work," and that he feels most connected to "the painterly tradition, the language of the brush" and artists—realist or abstract—"trying to make something exciting happen on the surface." After reviewing the sketches in the studio, he puts them aside to create drawings and studies based on his memory and experience of the place, which inspire large canvasses. Up close, images such as Equinox 09 #1 (2011) or Whisper #2 break down into small strokes of color and complex, textural, almost sculptural surfaces; from afar they coalesce into recognizable, often realistic images whose power and energy matches the majestic, natural physicality being depicted. ), smoke, and reflections of trees or fire on water (e.g., Lake Charles #2 ). Des Moines Art Center, New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, Boise Art Museum, Illinois State Museum, and Roswell Museum and Art Center, as well as in nearly fifty public collections.