James Pringle Cook

“My work is more choreographed than planned because there is a sequence of marks that interact to portray the subject. When I pick up a brush or a trowel and lay down a line, the tool plows up paint and changes the mixture of color. I have to choreograph that interaction between one layer of detail and another. It always takes me somewhere I don’t expect.”

— James Pringle Cook

His paintings are bold and monumental in scope and in the best tradition of American landscape painting. He is an artist absorbed with the process of painting. He paints quickly and creates richly colored, highly textured surfaces. While his work is reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists, it differs from them in that it projects a recognizable reality, dictated by his personal vision and technical skills. His paintings are bold and monumental in scope.

Cook often returns to Kansas to paint, en plein air, the Flint Hills and other local landscapes, often using a hardware store as his studio. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.