While the landscape paintings of James Cook are in the tradition of the country's earliest American landscape painters, they are not duplicates of those earlier works. Cook's art is uniquely his own and represents the world today. His art is the result of years of hard work, of intimately knowing the landscape, and depicting it with a passion.

James Cook is a painter absorbed with the process of painting. He paints quickly and creates richly colored, highly textured surfaces. While his work is reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists, it differs from them in that it projects a recognizable reality, dictated by his personal vision and technical skills. His paintings are bold and monumental in scope. Whether he depicts the ripples upon the surface of still pools in mountain streams or the color studies of a stormy sky, the artist's use of color and contrasting textures and techniques are intended to captivate the viewer to enter into the particular Western landscape portrayed.

In the artist's own words, "My work is more choreographed than planned because there is a sequence of marks that interact or portray the subject. If you pick up a brush or a trowel or something and lay down a line, the line is broad… it's narrow… it's 3 dimensional. It plows up paint and changes the mixture of color. ou have to choreograph that interaction between one layer of detail and another. It always takes me somewhere I don't expect."

Selective Museum Collections
Boise Art Museum, Idaho
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona
Rahr-West Museum, Wisconsin
Denver Art Museum, Colorado
Museum of Contemporary Art, Osaka, Japan

Selective Public Collections
Allied Bank of Texas, Houston
Cargill Incorporated, Minneapolis, MN
The Kemper Group, Chicago, IL
Mutual of New York, New York, NY
Texaco, London, England
West Publishing, St. Paul, MN
United Airlines, Chicago, IL
Yellowstone National Park Headquarters, Yellowstone, WY