Press Release - For immediate use
Richard Cook - Under The Summer
2 October - 31 December 2010
The Exchange, Penzance
A solo exhibition of work by Newlyn-based painter, Richard Cook, presenting work
created over the past two years
Cook’s paintings are a key inheritor of the British landscape tradition, fusing a classical regard for
light and composition with an expressionism rooted in the poetic psychology of self.
Cook returns repeatedly to a few sites close to his Cornish home, as well as Dartmoor and the
Brecon Beacons, drawing and absorbing an understanding through a repeated dialogue with these
places. This process of internalisation and transformation becomes, in the paintings, a layering of
memory and emotion, colour and form, which is a hallmark of his practice.
Richard Cook describes this stunning new body of work as
“…a dialogue with the familiar and with repetition, with what I know rather than with an
engagement seeking novelty. Through this my drive to invent is harnessed and I am given
The possibility of breaking beyond the obvious and entering, touching, a personal history of memory
and myth.
The studio is a place to which I return with these moments of energy, line and colour. Here the
drawings may wait, sit around for days, sometimes years until, again prompted by an unseen
demand, I find I am impelled to repossess that moment, to reclaim a fragment of life and time.
The urge and genesis for this work and the deepest reasons for it are in the actuality of being alive,
having breath. The thrill of an encounter with nature, the gleam of a river glimpsed in childhood or
the remembered light of a loved one’s face.”
As well as the large-scale paintings, for which Cook is best known, this exhibition presents
sketchbooks of watercolours and drawings executed with speed and spontaneity in the landscape.
These works, in particular, offer new insight and understanding of the process that underpins Cook’s
current body of work. There will be an accompanying illustrated publication with text by the artist.
Biog
Richard Cook has lived and worked in Cornwall for more than 20 years. He trained at St Martin's School of Art,
London, and at the Royal College of Art. He has been exhibiting for more than 25 years and has received
awards from the British Council and the Arts Council. In 2001 he was given a solo show at Tate St Ives, with a
related publication, and a major painting was acquired for the Tate collection in 2006.
Captions for images attached
Something Rose, 2010, oil on canvas, 153 x 183 cms
Broken Sky, 2010, watercolour in sketchbook, 42 x 59 cms
Photograph - Artist Richard Cook in his studio
For more information, to request alternative or hi-res images, or an interview with the artist, please contact
Kathy Hill, Marketing Officer, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange
Telephone: 01736 363715 email: Kathy.hill@newlynartgallery.co.uk
Blair Todd, Exhibitions Manager, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange
Telephone: 01736 363715 email: blair.todd@newlynartgallery.co.uk www.newlynartgallery.co.uk
Additional Information
Meetings Of Dreams
Paintings by Richard Cook and Partou Zia
3rd October – 14th November 2010
The Wills Lane Gallery, Wills Lane, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 1AF
01736 795723 www.willslanegallery.co.uk
Richard Cook is represented by Art First, London www.artfirst.co.uk