Anthony Cooke, Contemporary Landscape Artist

My practice involves the use of oil paints on canvas to create large, immersive landscape based images. My paintings are a documentation of my direct and physical experience of the non-urban landscape, particularly of Lincolnshire. The ideas behind my work draw primarily from nostalgia and the personal memories I associate with different parts of the landscape that have surrounded me as I grew up and as such, bear traces of past emotion combined with those experienced whilst creating each piece. My paintings are a method by which I may allow people to take an insight into my own experiences and memories, whilst hopefully invoking fresh ones, each unique and personal to the viewer.

 

My work draws inspiration from Artists such as Turner and Monet as well as contemporary landscape artists such as George Shaw. Rather than recreating images based on particular places, I work entirely from memory; as such, my paintings are not indicative of any one place and not intended as an imitation of any particular landscape, but are rather a recreation of an amalgamation of half-forgotten memories and experiences, set forward in a landscape format. As a result certain aspects of them such as colour, perspective and scale, may differ from what would be expected of reality.