Adam's The Antoinette and Patrick J.Murphy Collection 23rd October 2019

176 168 BARRIE COOKE HRHA (1931-2014) Black Stones (BC09900) Oil on canvas, 137 x 152cm (54 x 60 “) Signed, inscribed and dated 1999 Provenance: With the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 2000. € 8,000 - 12,000 It’s well-known that Barrie Cooke had Heraclitus’s words ‘Everything flows’ on his studio wall. The fifth-century BC, Greek philosopher’s belief that everything is in a state of flux resonated with English-born, US-educated, Irish artist Barrie Cooke who, having moved to Ireland in 1954, lived close to lakes and rivers in Kilnaboy, Co Clare, Thomastown, Co Kilkenny and Kil- mactranny, Co Sligo. Born in Knutsford, Cheshire, in 1931, his family emigrated to the US when Cooke was 16 and he began studying Biology at Harvard: ‘I was going to be a fishery biologist so that I could spend my life fishing’ but he switched to art history and painting and fishing became his lifelong enthusiasm. His Harvard degree, in History of Art, Biology and Chinese Poetry, and his knowledge of art history, his love of nature and his poetic sensibility are evident in his work. Seamus Heaney, writing about his friend, said that in Cooke’s case ‘[t]he rod tip is like a straw in the cosmic wind . . . the tip of the loaded brush is even more exploratory and receptive’. Black Stones , from 1999, the immediacy and freshness of the work, its movement and aliveness captures a fisherman’s attentiveness to the scene before him; it’s an artist-fisherman’s concentration on the moment. For Cooke, fishing was his contact with the earth, ‘It’s my meditation’. Black Stones is a work from the very end of the twentieth century and the end of a millennium. By then, and decades before global leaders paid any attention to the greatest crisis of our time, Barrie Cooke was very aware of how pollution was the world’s biggest challenge. He saw, first hand, the death of lakes and rivers and during the 1990s paintings such as ‘ Sewage Outlet ’ [1993] and ‘Lough Arrow Algae’ [1995] reflected his concerns. But this painting is fresh, clean, pure. It splashes with life. Cooke says ‘I think there has to be one thing in painting - energy, vitality, that’s ninety-nine percent of it’ and vibrant it is. The palette is simple. Black, white and blue. The large black stones are `more airy rather than weighed down and blue had always been important to Cooke: ‘right from youth blue has always been a wonderful colour. It is sky. It’s the blue of Titian, Bellini. It’s all those things.’ Both representational and abstract, Black Stones drips with light and movement. Cooke himself says that ‘Art maybe is an attempt to hold the moment, to keep it alive. It is difficult, and if you manage to realise actual vitality on the canvas you have achieved something quite rare, and perhaps that’s enough.’ This is a right here, right now painting. It is earth, air and water. Barrie Cooke spent a long time on each painting but it looks spontaneous and from the dazzling water, at any moment, a fish could jump. Barrie Cooke was chosen to represent Ireland at the Paris Biennale and the ten-year retrospective at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1986 was shown in Belfast, Cork and Limerick. A major show was held in the Haags Geementemuseum in 1992 and the RHA held a Retrospective in 2003. His work is in all major Irish Art Collections and international collections include Fogg Museum, Boston, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Harvard University, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Niall MacMonagle, August 2019