Richard Cook

Born in East Tennessee, Richard (1943- ) has spent his life in the arts. He attended the Manhattan School of Music in New York as well as Berklee School in Boston and enjoyed a very successful twenty year career as a Broadway show drummer/percussionist playing such shows as Promises, Promises, The Magic Show with Doug Henning, Pajama Game, and many more. During this time his love of photography was becoming a larger and larger part of his life and New York was the perfect place to pursue that.

In 2001 Cook added "Digital Art" to his arsenal of tools and suddenly found himself down the proverbial rabbit hole. Nothing was what it seemed and everything was possible! Things that would have cost hundreds of dollars in the lab were at his fingertips. Mold, mildew, rust, corrosion, flowers, natural textures " these all become a palette for the digital painter. Instead of squeezing them out of a tube, they are eventually stored on a disk.

Cook's Art combines traditional 35mm analog slide photography, darkroom mastery and digital enhancement to create the work of the artist.

Cook sometimes shoots photographs very deliberately for a specific image but frequently - it is just something interesting and much like an artist who creates from "found" materials, these images will be incorporated into future work.

The most common question Richard gets asked is, "Are these paintings or photographs of paintings?". When speaking about his technique he simply says, "If you can see the computer then I have failed."

Mr. Cook's art is available exclusively through the KML Gallery of Fine Art.