BARRIE COOK AT 80

Entering Barrie Cook’s studio, you see evidence of his sixty years working as a professional artist. Some paintings, on canvas, are huge – nearly ten feet by eighteen – while others, many on paper, are much smaller. In the large, bright working space there is little of the artist’s usual paraphernalia – easels, palettes and brushes. Instead you see metal ladders, buckets and an industrial spray gun that Cook uses in most of his work. There is paint, but in cans and jars, and the pigment-spattered floor confirms that this has been his studio for many years. Work is positioned on the walls, for when using the spray gun, he works on a vertical plain. The fine nature of spray paint gives an air of immediacy but, in reality, pieces are worked over many times for lengthy periods until brought to an acceptable conclusion.

Cook’s first one-man show in Cornwall was in 1998 when Newlyn Art Gallery exhibited thirteen of his works and Tate St Ives a further three. He describes it as a time of celebration, ‘having found my spiritual home’. All but one of these paintings had been made since his arrival six years earlier. The exception, measuring a staggering nine feet by eighteen, was Towards the Holy Grail (1970).

I had not seen one of Cook’s monumental works before and the effect was unforgettable. It featured a series of sooty vertical bars on a gradated blue-grey background. Towards the sides, the bars veered away from the centre before climbing upwards and straightening again. These soft-edged bands played visual tricks. It was impossible to tell whether they were receding or advancing and indeed, when concentrating on the work, just how far away it actually was.

Cook creates these vast paintings to draw the onlooker into a physical space dominated by the work. He defines three viewing positions: ‘intimate space’ (about four feet away), where the detail and quality of paint on canvas can be examined; further back (say, fourteen feet), which he describes as ‘public space’, and (his ideal viewpoint) approximately eight feet away, so that one is almost embraced by the work, conscious of its size beyond the field of vision.

His work is often described using musical analogies such as ‘rhythmic’, ‘pulsating’ and ‘sonorous’, an apt word aesthetically, but also apt in the other sense of ‘using imposing language’. Cook listens to classical music when he is working, explaining that Mahler’s Ninth Symphony inspired his Contiuum series. Such paintings remind me of the music of the American minimalist composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, with their repeated rhythms and incessant bands of sounds. Cook, too, expresses his liking for them, seeing comparisons between his work and theirs.

Many commentators have noted the ethereal purpose evident in Cook’s work in titles such as Philosophy of Meditation and Spiritual Genes. Paul Moorhouse, introducing the 1995 Barbican exhibition, stated, ‘The spiritual content of Cook’s work … is most explicit in his series … Silence Alone Is Appropriate’. (This series is a fine example of his earliest Cornish work.) William Packer, in his introduction to the Newlyn exhibition wrote that Cook ‘… said that his paintings are only about themselves, but in so saying, he smiles at his own disingenuousness, for by the very titles he gives them … he urges us to take them as something more.’

Barrie Cook has an unpretentious attitude to art, once describing Francis Bacon to me as

‘That Irish geezer who painted popes’. Watching him in his local pub at lunchtime engaging with his friends in the local fishing community, one could easily assume that this bluff Brummie has little to do with a distinguished academic career and a lifetime devoted to producing artworks with a spiritual intention. This may be an image he mischievously enjoys projecting. But it would be a profound mistake to allow this day-today persona to mask the real, artistic identity of the man.

Now in his eightieth year, he is still in his studio by ten o’clock most weekday mornings, ready for a day’s work. Since moving to Cornwall, with its clear light and sparkling seas, Cook’s palette has broadened, shifting from the earlier sombre blues and greys to a greater emphasis on primary and secondary colours. These paintings, with their vibrant turquoises, lush oranges and citrus yellows, point to an aesthetically recharged artist with a more exuberant edge to his work. It would be wrong to imagine that they have lost their profundity of purpose: the message may have altered somewhat, but the motivation remains as committed as ever.

Roger Bristow

© 2009 Roger Bristow. Roger Bristow is the author of The Last Bohemians – The Two Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, the biography of the two artists, to be published by Sansom & Co in January 2010.