"33 Summers"
"Untitled(with Honey)"
Monica Cook was born in Georgia and graduated Summa Cum Laude from from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1996. She now lives and works in New York, where she recently concluded a residency at the School of Visual Arts. Since 1992, Cook has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the US and Canada, as well as in the Netherlands, Israel, France and Switzerland. Publications include Art in America, Le Figaro, Elle Magazine, and New American Paintings.
Monica Cook paints hyper-realistic Symbolist portraits of female figures. These figures are brilliantly painted, with breathtaking skill; Cook excels in rendering the subtleties of the flesh and details of light, tone and surface. Painted with an eerie intensity, Cook's figures compel the viewer to study them, often surreptitiously, as there is a strong sense of invading an extremely private moment. We look, albeit sideways, with fascination at the beauty, humanity and complexity of these portraits.
Cook begins her work with photo-documented performances captured in a series of photographs or video. Although her compositions are painted from source images of herself, or more recently, friends chosen as models, Cook states that she rarely considers the finished work to be a "portrait" of herself or her model. Her interest lies in capturing a sense of the physicality of flesh - in the light reflecting from skin, or the colors trapped in shadows off the folds of the body - and in the psychological space that is created in the process of composing the work. Cook allows the true subject of the painting to develop as she works; she enjoys, as she says, both the freedom and surprise that comes from allowing "the character to evolve on its own and not become trapped by expectations or likeness."
The artist states: "I am often carried away with the details, using the paint to describe a near-cruel, sometimes disturbing, objectivity of the figure, heightening various textures on the body, the translucency of the skin, how the veins surface and recede, the subtle sheen of the lips and slickness of the eyes. I love to paint flesh, fascinated by how history is trapped in the skin: the stories told in lines etched into faces, bruises and scars from their past. I find myself heightening the details on and in the flesh, which enhances the mortal presence of the sitter and creates a tension between the psychological complexity of the person and their raw humanness."