Barrie Cooke

Barrie Cooke was born in England but moved to America, Jamaica and finally Bermuda with his family in 1946. He studied Biology and Chinese Poetry and graduated in Art History at Harvard University before studying painting under Rattner and Levine. In 1954 he came to live in Ireland and the following year he won a scholarship to study at Kokoschka's School of Seeing in Salzburg. Since then he has made Ireland his home, living successively in counties Clare, Kilkenny and Sligo. His subject matter in painting is derived from various aspects of nature and plants, animals, the human figure, rivers, lakes, sea and forests all emerge in his work. Certain themes dominate such as growth, decay and regeneration and elemental forces, particularly water. Many of these themes and preoccupations stem directly from the artist's own life experience, his travels to the rain forests of Borneo, to New Zealand, his interest in poetry and his passion for fishing. His style and its evolution is not easily classified, as he does not follow the more popular trends in painting bur rather works in an highly intuitive, rich, often sensual Expressionist manner. Cooke held his first one man show in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1953 and since the 1960s has regularly exhibited both in Ireland and abroad particularly in the United States and most recently in Holland where a major retrospective showing of his work was held in 1992 at the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague.

A powerful, thought-provoking image, it coincides in time and sculptural format with his studies of sheep carcasses and forms a link with his later bone box sculptures of the 1970s. While Cooke is chiefly an oil painter, his work has a very tactile nature and he has incorporated a variety of materials into his paintings including clay, bone, sand, peat, gypsum, silver and found objects.