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Artist: Barrie Cooke HRHA (1931-2014) Title: Nude with White and Black Sleeping (1986) Signature: signed, titled and dated (19)'86 verso Medium: oil on canvas Size: 132.40 x 149½cm (52.1 x 58.9in) Framed Size: 132.4 x 149.5cm (52.1 x 58.9in) Provenance: Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin (label verso); Private Collection a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} The black-and-white in this oddly titled painting refers to a black-and-white television set, the cool glow from which spills out over the contours of the sleeper. This was spelled out when a study for the painting was included in IMMA's 80th birthday retrospective in 2011. Born in Cheshire and b... Read more Barrie Cooke Lot 60 - 'Nude with White and Black Sleeping (1986)' Estimate: €7,000 - €10,000 The black-and-white in this oddly titled painting refers to a black-and-white television set, the cool glow from which spills out over the contours of the sleeper. This was spelled out when a study for the painting was included in IMMA's 80th birthday retrospective in 2011. Born in Cheshire and brought up partly in the Bahamas, Barrie Cooke went to university in the US and, he said, only really felt at home when he arrived in Ireland in the mid-1950s, having heard the trout-fishing was good. He settled in rural Co Clare, then Thomastown in Co Kilkenny and then on Lough Arrow in Sligo. Water was always at the centre of his art, even when water was not the specific subject: as is perfectly illustrated by this painting, the paint seems to flow onto his canvases and magically assume the form of the subject matter, here the voluptuous, sleeping nude. Cooke's exceptionally free, direct mode of painting, always true to the immediacy of his visual experience, was influenced early on by a spell at Kokoschka's summer school in Salzburg and Skowhegan in America. In Ireland he embraced what his friend Seamus Heaney once described as "the dark, wet, rural thing". His passionate engagement with the natural landscape stemmed in part from his love of fishing, and led him in time to produce a significant body of work addressing the realities of pollution and environmental damage. Working trips to Borneo and later on to New Zealand convinced him of the importance of trying to preserve the integrity of the natural world, even as he acknowledged how human impact was producing new and terrible forms of beauty. Aidan Dunne, September 2021