At the heart of Continuing the Search is the garden at Seagreens, an acre left largely untamed, pressed by salt wind and season. Observed across the turning year, it is presented not as idyll but as a site of renewal, where bulbs force through cold soil, grasses bend and rise again, and colour flares in spring and autumn before retreating. Working in oil with a vigorous, worked surface, Cook is a painter both rooted and restless, committed to the discipline of looking and to landscape as an inexhaustible subject.
A catalogue to accompany David Cook’s fourth solo exhibition at The Gallery Earth Shaker. Cook has chosen to focus his energies on the wild, seaside garden in front of his cottage. The fertile grassy acre between the house and the rocky coast is a wilderness garden, enlivened with flotsam sculpture, thrumming with life and brilliant in colour in the summer. Flowers and long grasses grow untamed, threatening to engulf his studio. His paintings are made in rich impasto of oil paint, with a joyous freedom.
For this exhibition, the product of two years’ hard work, Cook has chosen to focus his energies on two specific subjects. The first is the wild and colourful garden surrounding his studio, in these paintings flowers, trees and grasses are captured with deft movements of his knife or brush, the high colour never exaggerated but based on direct observation of his subject. His second theme is the now demolished papermill and scrap-yard at Inverkeithing (a once familiar sight to those travelling north on the train from Edinburgh). These paintings, completed in a restricted palette akin to LS Lowry’s, are based on the artist’s recordings of the area in the 1980s and 90s.
