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James Pringle 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. Museum Director Robert Yassin described Cook as "a painter who is in love with painting [whose] bravura use of paint is akin to the abstract expressionists; unlike them, however, he provides viewers with a recognizable reality, ordered by his own personal vision and controlled by his technical mastery." Discussing his urban works, Margaret Regan wrote, "Cook is so skilled a painter he can turn almost anything into a thing of beauty […] His bravura handling of the paint is what matters: his pure layers of color, slabbed in thick gobs onto his linen canvases with a palette knife, glistening like butter."

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. More than seventy museum and public collections hold Cook's work, including the Denver Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum. Provided by Wikipedia