COOKE 2008.206

Nigel Cooke uses painstaking seventeenth-century Flemish painting techniques to create imagery drawn from popular art forms such as graffiti and the graphic novel. He is interested in the collision between this artisanal, labour-intensive approach to painting and the immediacy that is possible in contemporary modes of image-making.

To work is to play explores the myths and clichés associated with the persona of ‘the artist’. Cooke presents the idea of the ‘tortured’ artist – a characterisation that he exploits to tragicomic effect in his paintings. The clownish, bearded figures, described as ‘Van Gogh tramps’, wander through a decaying urban environment that recalls the abandoned industrial areas of his native Manchester. The mausoleum-like building in the background evokes the brutalist architecture of British public buildings constructed in the 1960s and 70s. Here, it is daubed in graffiti, giving the building a pathetic appearance that deflates the grandiose utopian posturing of modernism.