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.

"[1] 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.

12, 24, 36),[15] major newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Arizona Daily Star,[16] Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Mexican,[17] and television news features in Dallas, Phoenix and Tucson.

Cook's work has been described as an individualistic, unpretentious "balance of realism, abstract expressionism and impressionism"[24][10][25]—a designation somewhat borne out by artists he names as key influences: J. M. W. Turner, Manet, Monet, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, and Frank Auerbach.

[27][14][28] Critics have observed that Cook's uncompromising artistic vision and approach place signature works, such as Whisper #2 (2013) or Morgan's Point (1995–6), in a breach between cutting edge and traditional, and abstraction and realism, that transcends labels and welcomes "art conservatives and iconoclasts alike.

[29][30][31] Cook has stated, "the tension between the two poles [of realism and abstraction] has always been the thing that enlivens my work," and that he feels most connected to "the painterly tradition, the language of the brush" and artists—realist or abstract—"trying to make something exciting happen on the surface.

"[12][1] Cook's process generally begins with a visit to a location—favorites include the Arizona mountains, the rolling hills of Kansas, and Idaho's Silver Creek Preserve—where he sketches plein air, usually in oil.