An artist at home in the natural world

Barrie Cooke’s 80th birthday is marked by a retrospective that celebrates his love of women and fishing, reports Carl Dixon

THE Crawford Art Gallery in Cork is playing host to a retrospective of work by Barrie Cooke, one of Ireland’s pre-eminent artists.

The exhibition celebrates the artist’s 80th birthday — it ran at the Irish Museum of Irish Art in Dublin over the summer and runs at the Crawford until January 14. It features a selection of his work from a long career — inspired by the natural world, by women and his love of angling — which began with his first exhibition in Dublin in 1955.

Cooke was born in Cheshire, England in 1931 but spent most of his early years in Bermuda, Jamaica and the US. Initially he studied biology — an interest which greatly influences his art — but soon realised he wanted to be a painter. Returning to England in 1954, he was disillusioned by what he found and decamped to rural Clare. He has been based in Ireland ever since.

Angling has always been an obsession for Cooke, and upon his arrival in Ireland he went into the first tackle shop he encountered and asked where he might find the best dry fly fishing. As luck would have it, the man he asked was Jack Harris, one of Ireland’s most knowledgeable anglers, who thought about it and marked an X on a map. Later that summer, as he travelled around Ireland by motorbike, Cooke found himself perched on a bridge at Corofin. It seemed perfect. He checked on his map and discovered that this was the same place Harris had marked upon it. Serendipity, it seems.

“I moved into an old cottage with no electricity or running water,” he recalls. “But I had no more or less than most of my neighbours. My motorbike was the only vehicle in the area, and I was the first person from abroad to come here. They were such good people and gave me everything that I needed.”

The fishing was as good as he had hoped, with ideal conditions for large brown trout and pike. Paintings of both feature in the exhibition, and Cooke’s biologist eye for detail has helped him conjure up the green, aqueous world beneath the water’s surface.

Séamus Heaney, a friend who has collaborated with Cooke in the past, has entitled his essay in a monograph on Cooke’s work, An Angler’s Crouch. In this essay he writes: “As a fisherman and as a painter, on the riverbank and in the studio, he combines the quickness of perception with sparseness and intensity of action. There is the unselfconsciousness and the efficiency of long discipline about his habitual stances, whether it be his totally concentrated angler’s crouch as he gauges the feel and flow of the water, or his stepped back, arm’s length, rigorous alertness before work-in-progress on the canvas.”

Cooke’s lifestyle in Clare may have been frugal, but it allowed him to completely immerse himself in the natural world and gave him the space and time to single-mindedly develop his skill as an artist. “I remember a friend came to visit and I brought him up to the mountain where I knew a flock of geese would fly over us to reach the lake,” he says. “We lay in folds of the rock and the geese flew about ten feet above us. These are things you never forget.” He later commemorated this first period in Ireland in the painting Map of Kilnanboy in 1954.

In the late 1960s, and now living in Kilkenny, Cooke’s interest was piqued by looking at the butcher’s bones he fed to his dog. It led to a series of sculptures in boxes which attempted to capture the smooth, visceral qualities of bone in a way that painting couldn’t. In a similar vein, his paintings of Giant Elk were inspired by the visit to a friend in Trinity College. Women from his life, eroticism and naturalistic nudes also featured prominently in his work, and his interest in mythology influenced his dramatic and highly sexualised Sheela-na-Gig in clay from the 1960s. He was also drawn in by the strange, legendary figure of Mad Sweeney; a fascination he shares with Heaney.

Cooke has travelled extensively, sometimes choosing to live in remote areas of the world. The vitality and vibrancy of life in the untamed jungle are captured in paintings such as First Morning at Tasek Bera and Slow Dance Forest Floor, both painted in 1976. More recently, his disgust at modern pollution of his beloved rivers and lakes is evident in Algal Growth 1990 and Sewage Outlet, River Nore 1992.

Walking in the Crawford Art Gallery, surrounded by his life’s work, Cooke is unsure how much it has improved, despite a steady output over the years. He has one particular favourite. Summer Knot 1982 consists of two twisted strands, reminiscent perhaps of sailing ropes, on a black background. “I can’t say precisely what was going on in my mind when I painted it, or what it represents, or even why it appeals to me so much,” he says. “Yet it seems perfect to me. When I see the painting, I am amazed that I actually created it.”