“I have a twisted view of things,” says S. Tucker Cooke. “If I had to choose between lightness and darkness, I would choose darkness.” All the same, Cooke has shed much light in his lifetime of painting and educating. A glimpse through his 20-plus-page résumé proves all he’s accomplished: his 36 years heading UNCA’s Art Department, solo shows across the Southeast, inclusion in prestigious invitational exhibits, scrolls of awards.
Cooke’s work appears in numerous public collections. And he says that “art can come from anywhere — but it has to have conviction.” His figurative paintings particularly embody that rule. In a series produced in the mid-’90s, Cooke painted human figures morphed with animal heads and sphinx-like features. They tell the stories of Egyptian myths — a strong inspiration. “I became enthralled in how they saw death and how much effort they spent on the dead,” says Cooke.
For that series Cooke worked intuitively, letting the forms evolve as he painted. “I would work with mostly value and very little color at first, and would just look at what the form was asking for,” he explains. The result is a series of mythological hybrid beasts — massive and powerful.
His recent paintings required more planning and a more varied palette. In Expulsion from Eden (2000), a large, bevelled ruby heart glints above a nude couple that shield themselves from a blinding light. Like much of Cooke’s work, the painting demonstrates the mythological sway of Neoclassicism and the brute passion that appealed to the Romanticist painters. “I have found that I am most intrigued by Romanticism,” reads a portion of Cooke’s artist’s statement. “But like [the painter] Ingres, I have struggled to be ordered.”
Cooke’s artistic journey began in Newberry, Florida, where he grew up; the exotic subtropical landscape has frequently entered his paintings and drawings. “Being Southern-born, my work contains the romantic aspects of sultry summer nights so hot you can barely breathe,” his statement goes on. The child of Southern Baptists, Cooke says Biblical stories were ingrained in him at a young age: “It is in these stories where I find passion.”
When he was only four, Cooke was stricken with polio and forced away from his family for a year, confined to an infirmary for treatment. “That kind of trauma probably set my mind — the aspect of isolation and distance from safety,” he says. Vividly recalling the searing pain of the scalding blankets that were used as treatment on his left leg, he remarks, “These days they have vaccines for polio, but back then they didn’t know anything about it.”
The disease damaged Cooke’s leg, which later inspired a sculptural installation and a series of self-portraits of the limb: “That deformity influences how I distort images in what I paint.”
Upon entering college in 1960, Cooke thought he would become a doctor and conduct missions in Africa. When he was granted an opportunity to illustrate a lab book for his biology class, he enrolled in a drawing class instead and “never looked back.” Four years later he graduated with a degree in art, then received his MFA from the University of Georgia.
In 1966 Cooke accepted a job as professor at Asheville-Biltmore College, the predecessor of UNC-Asheville. He was named Chair of the Art Department in the ’70s, a position he held until 2004. During his time, the department added a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, a prominent gallery and significantly increased enrollment. “It went from being a seven-student department when I arrived to having over 100 students when I left,” he says.
The year before his retirement, Cooke directed the creation and installation of a mural reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens that rises 37 feet above the Highsmith University Union Café. The mural is composed of 60 four-foot panels. In total, 50 people worked almost 15,000 hours to complete Cooke’s vision.
His name is not only immortalized through the mural: The school has renamed their University Gallery the S. Tucker Cooke Gallery, an honor Cooke calls “most surprising and humbling.”
Contact Warren Fluharty Designs to see more of Cooke’s work, call 828-273-1101 or visit www.warrenfluhartydesigns.com.