Barrie Cooke : The Moment Of Seeing

In several senses, Barrie Cooke occupies the middle ground in Irish art. He lives in Kilkenny. At Jerpoint near Thomastown, with Sonja Landweer, and he is one of the few artists in the country to have earned the near universal approbation of his peers. The quahty. range and consistency of his work have engendered wide and genuine respect.

Firmly rooted in nature, that work is fluent, rich and expressive. Certain motifs recur obsessively ,like the spiraJ pattern of organic growth, for example, or the ball and socket of joints, emblematic forms that embody basic natural principles. The paintings are saturated with a sense of their own subject matter: water, light, earth, vegetation, growth, change, decay and renewal. Cooke is a gifted and resourceful draughtsman. With some previous experience of work in three dimensions, in 1969 he began to produce his bone boxes. distinctive sculptures of painted ceramic in perspex boxes that have come to represent a major thread of his work.

He also makes portraits. Invariably, the sitters are friends, including Seamus Heaney, Siobhan McKenna, Nora Ring, Brian Boydell and Sonja. A portrait of Ted Hughes remains unfinished in his studio: whenever the poet visits, he is more inclined to go fishing than sit. Of all Cooke's work, the portraits most clearly suggest the influence of his teacher, Kokoschka. Writing in The Dubliner in 1964, John Montontague described Cooke 'as an "intense, dark-beared young man". He is now in his early fifties, but otherwise the description still stands. Stocky, relaxed and assured, his one concession to nerves is to smoke roll-your-own cigarettes.

He reads a lot, poetry and anthropology, is receptive to new ideas and discusses art with tireless enthusiasm. He regards work that he likes - de Kooning and Beckmann, among others - with frank, unaffected wonder. At Jerpoint, he and Sonja grow most of their own food. Though he sometimes resents the work, he would rather spend the one day a week that it takes in the garden than teaching. He does do a minimal amount of teaching, but he finds it difficult and disruptive. Other demands on his time include an involvement in the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny Castle and a position on the board of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Cooke was born in Cheshire in England; his mother was American, and the family moved to the States while he was still a child. His father hated it and they eventually ended up in Bermuda, the nearest British colony. At seventeen, Cooke went to Harvard ; and took a BA, studying biology, Chinese poetry and art history, three disparate subjects that influenced him significantly.

Coming from a middle class background, he knew that art existed, but there were few pictures around when he was growing up and it never occurred to him that there were such things as painters until he went to Harvard. Once he realised, he knew that that was what he wanted to be.

His practical art education in America consisted of a spell at Skowhegan, a prestigious art school staffed by practising artists who worked their students hard. Cooke took automatically to the discipline of work. When he went on to Bermuda, he held down three jobs simultaneously for a year to save enough money for a trip. He had decided to go back to England.

The story of how he arrived and decided to stay in Ireland is typical of his approach to life and work in its calm acceptance of chance and its grudging but definite belief in fate. England, austere, dismal and grey, was a huge disappointment. Cooke went on to Wales. Through a friend at Harvard, he had two Irish contacts, and he took a boat from Holyhead. Walking down the gangplank at Dun Laoghaire, he sensed an openness, a freedom that he liked. In Dublin, he did two things.

Firstly, he headed for the best fishing tackle shop he could find, Garnetts and Keegan's in Parliament Street. He put a map of Ireland on the counter. He was looking, he said, for a limestone, high pH river with a lot of vegetation that would provide the best dry fly fishing in the country. The man he happened to ask was Jack Harris, one of the men best qualified to answer such a question. After about ten minutes thought, he drew an X through a spot in Clare.

Next Cooke rang one of his contacts, architect Niall Montgomery, said he was looking for a cheap motorbike, and asked for advice. Montgomery took him to see Reg Armstrong, who had just started selling and servicing motorbikes out of a shed. Cooke bought one, for £15, and headed west, to Kilkee and the summer home of his other contact.

The house was choc a block with children and in-laws. No problem, said the shameless Cooke, I have a blanket, I'll sleep on the kitchen floor.

Next day he was driven around to have a look at the country and ended up, in the evening, perched on a bridge near Corofin. He looked down on a river that fitted his criteria exactly, consulted his map, and found that he was standing on the spot Jack Harris had marked.

He moved to the village as a paying guest, and later rented a two-room cottage. It was three fields away from the road, there was no path, no water, no electricity. He settled there for a bout a year and a half. When, a couple of years ago, he went there with Sonja, through the windows they could make out an unfinished painting, bits of paper and the piece of lino he'd used as a palette. There is a startling, linear clarity to it all that is almost perplexing, hut Cooke puts it down to one factor: he has always known precisely what he wanted.

He spent the summer of 1955 at Kokoschka's School of Vision in Salzburg. Characteristically, he went with enough money for a stay of two weeks, but was, fortuitously awarded a scholarship. The regimen was strict. From nine o'clock until it was dark the students drew with charcoal as three' or four models moved non-stop around the studio. There were segregated dormitories and a basic cafeteria that served fare like calves lung. A chosen few, Cooke included, were rewarded with a few mornings' oil painting at the end of the summer.

Since the late fifties, Cooke has maintained a consistent and vigorous presence on the Irish art scene. One of the founder members of the Independent Artists, he had ten paintings in the first show. Patrick Collins liked them and brought them to the attention of gallery owner David Hendriks, beginning an association that lasted until Hendriks' death late last year. Cooke appreciated his faithfulness. Buyers, for example, did not take to the bone boxes immediately. Out of the first box show, perhaps two and one watercolour were sold. When two years later, it was time for another show, Hendriks inquired what it was going to be. I'm afraid it's boxes, replied Cooke with some trepidation, but Hendriks was un flustered and offered no criticism.Cooke's life is a sequence of abrupt changes. It has the air of a quest: forsaking the undoubted commercial promise of America for the rigour and loneliness of a spartan cottage in Clare; the summer in Salzburg; Amsterdam in the early sixties; Kilkenny and Thomastown in the mid-sixties; and then the Borneo trip. Every move derived from some overwhelming personal need.

"What made me take this trip to Africa?" asks Saul Bellow's fictional Henderson, a character who corresponds to some degree with Cooke. There are reasons. Cooke is no tourist. He is impressed at the seeming inevitability of what he has done, how things have unfailingly connected and made some kind of higher sense. He has never been motivated by ambition. The treadmill of commercial success - big cities, parties, openings doesn't interest him. His work is very much the fruit of perception in extremis. "How closely," asks John Montague, "can the artist expose himself to flux and still transpose his findings into that other form of life called art?"

Cooke eschews the facile image, the felicitous technique. The worst insult Kokoschka could dole out to a student was to remark of a piece of work that "You could frame that and put it in an exhibition." Cooke appreciated the remark when he came up against the impasse of facility himself. More than once he has felt the prisoner of technique, felt that he was making work fine as far as it went, but too smooth, too accomplished and too sure of its own terms. The feeling presaged and induced change. This happened to him in the early sixties and in the middle seventies. The first time, he made the surface of his pictures spare and dry, dismissing any voluptuous qualities. The next time, he went the opposite way.

He remembered a few months he had spent in Jamaica in his teens. He was reading Lawrence for the first time. He had his first love affair. lt was the first time he had encountered semHropical vegetation. As a child he had been a keen amateur naturalist. Now he realised with alarm that he knew less about the local bu ttertlies than he had when he was nine. What he wanted, he decided, was primary forest. He settled on Malaysia and Borneo as possibilities.

To finance the trip he sent letters to collectors, people who had bough t his work in the past. He could promise nothing but first choice of whatever he might produce. Having posted the first batch, he was strolling along South Anne Street when a stranger hailed him. "Are you Barrie Cooke?" he asked. It was Pat Murphy, Chairman of Rose '84, who worked at the time for Guinness. Through one of those extraordinary coincidences that Cooke seems to attract, Murphy had been, for a time, stationed in Malaya. While there he had brought over a show of Irish art, including work by Ie Brocquy. He had contacts.

The northwest Borneo coast, is an exceptional place. Inhabited by the Iben, the most numerous and aggressive of the Dayak tribes, it was granted to Sir James Brooke by the Sultan of Brunei in 1841. Brooke ruled as an unusually benevolent feudal lord. He was frequently criticised for not exploiting the resources he had at his disposal and he discouraged attempts at converting the Iben. Cooke had reckoned on a stay of two months, but he found that he could live there cheaply and stayed four. He went as a naturalist, which made it easier to obtain a visa, and he collected butterflies. He travelled by foot and canoe and stayed in the local communal longhouses. There were few Europeans about, apart from the inevitable Irish priest or two.The forest in Cooke's work, in his world, is the thing itself, a humid, steaming, fertile, burgeoning, dark cathedral of growth and decay. And it is a metaphor. Everything happens there, all the time. Things grow, develop, change, join. The division between life and death is blurred. As Bellow has Henderson's mentor remark: "Some parts may be so longburied as to be classed dead. Is there any resurrectibility in them? This is where the change comes in." Cooke points up the process of change, and resurrects what we have dismissed as lost, dead, inert.

The marvellous, organic density of his work corresponds to a density of thought, feelings and ideas that goes into it. Though many of the pictures, particularly, have a loose effortless look about them, he is a slow worker. Individual paintings take months, even years. He can worry away at a picture for weeks on end, then resolve it within a few hours. He works in series that connect and overlap. "Great Tench Lake" anticipated the drenched green space of the Borneo forest paintings. The mythical character Sweeney who surfaced in his last show had formed the subject of a long series of studies, many of them made at the same time as the elk drawings and paintings. The Sheela na Gigs of the early sixties anticipate the spectacular relief modelling of the eviscerated sheep painted later in the decade, and they in their turn led on to the bone boxes.To Cooke, art is about vision, the moment of seeing. The instant of revelation when fundamental patterns and connections become apparent. Kokoschka's overriding concern was that people should be receptive, should be open to seeing.

When Cooke enlisted his butcher's aid in recovering portions of sheep carcasses, it followed on from paintings he had made about couples joining, conjunctions. And when, one day, helpfully sectioning the scapula of a sheep, the butcher, cleaver in hand, inquired where exactly he should cut, Cooke, peering at the livid complication of flesh and bone, was struck by this continuity: bone, gristle, flesh. And experienced the revelation that bone is muscle congealed. Not one thing or the other, but both. His art is made of such moments.