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 disturb between veracity 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 consent that his play in is as much about pure painting as it is very nearly his convincing recapitulations of the world and a suitability of place. Museum Director Robert Yassin described Cook as "a painter who is in adore with painting 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 highbrow mastery." Discussing his urban works, Margaret Regan wrote, "Cook is so capable a painter he can direction almost anything into a thing of beauty […] His bravura handling of the paint is what matters: his resolution layers of color, slabbed in thick gobs onto his linen canvases later than a palette knife, glistening considering butter."

Cook has exhibited throughout the United States and in Canada in greater than seventy solo exhibitions, including shows at the Tucson Museum of Art, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art and Roswell Museum and Art Center, and activity exhibits at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Wichita Art Museum, among many. His fake 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 Keep Cook's work, including the Denver Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum.