Daisy Cook Paintings for Saleb 1965

Daisy Cook is a British painter of landscape and still life.

Cook creates abstracted paintings that take landscape as their subject without being explicitly topographical or descriptive. In fact, the meeting points of land, sea and sky have long been a focus for her. There is a subtlety of surface and depth, texture and light. Her landscapes are quiet and contemplative interpretations of natural environments and her interiors are equally as experiential, created by dragging, dripping and pouring oil paint that is rich in earth pigments. In all her work, Cook looks for new methods to build tensions between shapes, with the paintings made slowly and revealing themselves over time. Some areas are ambiguous and veiled, others clear and sharp. The experience of motherhood, ‘the most tender thing I’ve ever felt’, has undoubtedly fed into her work, as well as having focused and polarized her studio activity.

'Through a suggestion of silvery clouds and mudflat she evokes a littoral: not a specific view or portrait of a place, but a larger statement about this type of country as a habitat for the spirit, a place where the imagination may soar. Photographs are used as reference, but the key energy of these paintings resides in Cook's singular ability to recognize and identify the extraordinary in the ordinary. Her particular quality of recognition breathes through these images, animating them. Intuition and chance play their part, but they would be inert without the guiding principle of the artist's vision.'

Andrew Lambirth, May 2006

'Cook aims at capturing the experience of being in a particular landscape or of swimming in its waters. Her paintings resemble thresholds, veils of colour and light filtered through a memory.'

London Magazine

Cook's works are in the collection of the Bank of England, Heckfield Place; La Caixa Bank; Majorca One Aldwych; Manhattan Loft Corporation; The Great Eastern Hotel; Hoffman Investment Management; and the Royal Free Hospital, London. Her work has been shown at the Royal Academy, Mall Galleries, Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler and Berkeley Square.