For some time now Michael Cook has been living and painting in New Mexico, and his paintings since the late eighties reflect both his understanding of the beauty of his surroundings and his recognition of the threat to its sacred ecology or wholeness. In turn, what Cook sees in New Mexico and the West and, in fact, the nation, is a reflection of what he sees in the contemporary world as a whole. In darkly ironical paintings of the late eighties he attempted to come to terms with the glory and horror of his environment, both local and general. The body of work as a whole is entitled Instructions. But, through distinctive coloring, symbolic details, and a novel technique of layering, the artist presents us with new, less traditional instructions.
Clean figure seems gradually to emerge and to superimpose itself on the monument in question.
A less obvious instruction is contained in the particularly elegant painting of an old reconstructed southern mansion revealed behind a mist of green with little spots some viewers might see romantically as fireflies and some as bruises on a southern mythology which veils undermining social and historical realities. Of course, we know it always does hurt. A still closer look at the painting shows us decay expressed in paint that seems, like the faces on Cook's Mount Rushmore, to be decomposing. Like the bubble chamber images used in his earlier work of the seventies and eighties, these new paintings present a vision of a seemingly abstract world, which we gradually perceive to be reality itself, a reality which changes our understanding of our nature and our being. We are drawn into the ideas by the painting, not into the painting by the ideas.