Biography

Gordon Cook was born in 1927 in Chicago. He attended Illinois Wesleyan University, receiving a B.F.A. in 1950. During his undergraduate years, Cook studied intaglio printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he attended lectures by Stanley William Hayter. Cook took graduate courses at the University of Iowa, where he further developed his skills in printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky.

In 1951, Cook along with his wife, Marilyn Wilson, moved to San Francisco where he began showing his artwork. Although Cook initially produced both paintings and prints, the artist shifted his efforts almost exclusively toward etching. Cook was among the charter members at the formation, in 1955, of the Bay Printmakers Society. Others in the group included Beth van Hoesen, Karl Kasten, and Nathan Oliveira. Cook’s early etchings portrayed San Francisco landscapes, such as Golden Gate Park, Diamond Heights, and Lake Merced. He also focused on flower studies. These works were shown in national juried exhibitions sponsored by the Bay Printmakers and held at the Oakland Art Museum. (Bay Printmakers later merged with the California Society of Etchers to become the California Society of Printmakers.)

Figure drawing would be a lifelong passion, and Cook would become a member or organizer of several weekly groups where artists gathered to draw from a model. In the late 1950s and early 60s, for example, he would meet with Alvin Light, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, and William H. Brown. In this same period, he began teaching drawing and printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1964, the artist was honored with a one-man exhibition at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in the Legion of Honor.

Cook left San Francisco in 1969 with new wife, fellow artist Joan Brown. The couple moved to the small community of Rio Vista in the Sacramento River delta. Cook shifted his focus toward painting, while also teaching printmaking at Sacramento State University. He continued his drawing, participating in a weekly group that included his wife, as well as Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri.

The couple returned to San Francisco in 1971. Cook began to exhibit at the Charles Campbell Gallery, with which he would have a long association. He taught at Academy of Art College, and then at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Davis. Cook became a regular member of the weekly drawing group at “the Firehouse,” the home of artists Mark Adams and Beth van Hoesen. Others who joined them included Wayne Thiebaud and Theophilus Brown.

After Cook and Joan Brown divorced, Gordon married Liadain O’Donovan. In 1979, Gordon and Liadain moved to a home on Union Street that offered views to the northeast, across San Francisco Bay, to Richmond. The artist had a personal affinity for the bay, where he pursued high-endurance swimming as a member of the Dolphin Club. Cook also had an artistic interest in scenes viewed from across water. In the early 1960s, he had created a series of etchings based on the view of the Marin headlands. In the delta, he produced paintings of boat slips and landscapes seen across the Sacramento River. Now, Cook turned his attention toward a prominent landmark in Richmond, the tall cylinder of a natural gas tank. It would be the subject of many works.

The last five years of Cook’s life were busy ones. He was a quiet man who kept to his own counsel, yet had a few close friends that he was very fond of and for the first time in his career, he was able to focus almost exclusively on his art. He continued occasional teaching, giving courses at Mills College and the California College of Arts and Crafts. Cook produced drawings and paintings, and returned to printmaking. The artist worked on major print projects with such fine art printers as Hank Hine at Limestone Press, Tim Berry at Teaburry Press, and David Kelso at “made in California.”

Cook also became known for yet another dimension of his art—sculpture. The artist was a skillful woodworker, and he had long practiced the craft by making a variety of models and figures. These pieces began to be shown alongside his two-dimensional work, and they became the subjects themselves of drawings, paintings and prints. The artist also launched a project of casting in bronze several of his distinctive wooden “stick figure” sculptures.

An extraordinary career in art was cut short by the artist’s untimely death in 1985, at the age of 57.