Charlie Cook exhibit at Regional Arts Center showcases talent,
Charlie Cook exhibit at Regional Arts Center showcases multidimensional artist’s talent
For the late, local artist Charlie Cook, lively colors and unique forms collided and coalesced to make art that’s memorable and personal, full of curiosity, nostalgia and beauty.
Cook, a longtime and much-loved member of the arts scene here in Texarkana who died in 2017 at the age of 84, was prolific with his art over the years—utterly charming work ranging from oil paintings to T-shirts and so much more.
Charlie picked up painting again in his 50s after raising children with his wife Joan. It was an interest he developed as a kid, then a subject he studied formally at the Pratt Institute and Cooper Union in New York City.
Cook’s art now hangs in a new exhibit at the Regional Arts Center in downtown Texarkana. Up through Jan. 26 with the title “The Beauty We Love,” the exhibit features 20 of Cook’s strongest works.
A descriptive panel at the exhibit describes much to praise about Cook and his artwork.
It reads, “However, the strength of Cook’s work lies in his subtle use of art historical signals to inspire his viewer to make emotional connections to his colors and compositions. In this exhibition you see references to art historical traditions such as vanitas paintings— reminders of the beautiful yet transient nature of our lives.”
Also singled out for praise is Cook’s exploration of the “cycle of life and death.”
“Cooks’s peaceful landscapes and images of ploughs, farmhouses, and homes from his own experiences remind us all of the passage of time and the changing of seasons through his nostalgia and memory,” the panel continues.
The exhibit consists of just a smidgen of what Texarkana artist Polly Cook and her sister Kristen, Charlie’s daughters, have of his art. The oil paintings on the wall only tell part of his story. Polly also has a photo book of dozens upon dozens of other paintings, newspaper clippings from his days in the Nashville, Tenn., art scene, a sketchbook and more. Prolific, indeed he was.
Polly explains that Cook got back to art seriously later in life after other responsibilities had been met. “When he was young he wanted to be an artist. He studied in the best schools,” she said. But he focused on family and labored practically to gain an income, including work for a gardening company. Among her possessions is a gardening book Cook wrote. She’s pictured inside, a youngster tilling the dirt.
“When I see how much he produced, starting in his early 50s just really giving himself to it, it’s kind of astounding to me,” Polly said, adding of his decision to get back to his art, “He wanted to do what he always really wanted to do.”
As a child, Cook copied comic books. In his art, she says, he always enjoyed creating work that reminded him of his childhood. He grew up on a farm, so depictions of it appeared everywhere in his works: a plow, a horse, a chicken. They sold immediately.
“He did a whole series for a show that was all childhood memories,” his daughter said, noting he also finished up a degree in film at U.S.C. At the time, he was a Seventh Day Adventist, so the family returned to Nashville where he worked for a publishing company with a Christian magazine. He also had real estate and built a cabin, another indicator of his boundless creativity.
Polly’s mother grew up in Texarkana, so that is how the family eventually found its way here, where Charlie continued his art and had a gallery.
There’s a wise quote nestled in an artist statement Cook wrote in one of his sketchbooks that Polly has. “If you want a happy ending you have to quit before the end of the story,” it reads. Then he continues, saying, “Going after perfection is a losing pursuit. Art must include the unexpected. Both for the viewer and painter. I’m pushed on by the unexpected stuff that happens along the painting journey.”
In his statement, Cook puts his love for art this way: “The things I paint are quite unimportant to me. I’m not painting a subject, I’m painting a painting. It’s the use of paint, the feeling of paint, the lust of paint, the texture, the application, the accidents of paint and most of all the color of paint that sucks me in.”
Artists, he wrote, take themselves too seriously, while he was clearly enamored with the process of it, with doing it. Art has its place, he says, but he didn’t exalt it on high. He stressed than an artist should have fun, too.
A handful of the works here are paintings that include brief sayings. “He had really got into doing these with affirmations, with the words,” Polly said. They were also popular and sold well, too, containing phrases that have a Zen Buddhist feel to them.
Cook’s art welcomed the imperfections to be seen in life. Polly also sees something psychological in his shapes—how tree limbs may twist together, or how a certain building may be windowless. “He did not want things to look perfect,” Polly said. For him, art was about color. He’d always tell Polly to work on her colors. His weren’t straight from a tube, she says.
He did what she called kitchen art, beautiful little watercolors. He’d sell them at craft fairs, and they’d do those fairs together. He made lamps out of wood, too. He built tables. He started a back-to-the-land magazine called Yard and Fruit. He was happy to see his art find its way to people’s homes. That satisfied him.
He’d work from sketches, not from photographs. Why? He wasn’t interested in an exact representation. It’s more about the emotion, improvising from shapes.
“I thought he wanted it to be his feeling from it,” Polly said. “He wanted to remind himself.” At the same time, Cook strived to be accessible with his work, even if it was personal.
When Dr. Becky Black, visual arts and community programs coordinator at the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council, sees his art, she finds echoes of the Post-Impressionist master Paul Gauguin.
“I tried to highlight his different genres,” Black said, noting Cook’s art, informed by his excellent training, simply runs the gamut with art historical themes. She sees an “entire narrative of life,” she said.
Black notices, too, the emphasis on color and an insistence on naturalism, noting on the third floor the art selected shows that narrative path his works can take, too. She believes Cook’s artwork warrants more attention.
“He is, to me, Texarkana’s Gauguin,” Black said, referencing his felicity to paint from memory, working with still lifes and landscapes. “Personally, you can just feel it, what he’s trying to say.”
Listening to his daughter Polly talk about her dad, her love for him and his art shine through. His local fans loved him. He made the sort of art that inspires both joy and a sense of awe.
“It makes me really proud. I’m very proud of him anyway, but I love seeing it shown with respect like this,” she said about Cook’s art in this exhibit.