No Place Like Home: The Art of William Delafield Cook
A new survey of Australian artist William Delafield Cook – the first exhibition of his work since his death in 2015 – reminds us of the artist’s distinct style and the enduring, timeless quality of his paintings.
Image credit: William Delafield Cook, Haystack, 1998, acrylic on linen, 76 x 76 cm. Courtesy Olsen Gallery
William Delafield Cook AM (1936–2015) devoted his life to capturing the Australian landscape. During a career spanning over sixty years, he painted the country’s unmistakable terrain and rural imagery with striking realism. Now, a new exhibition gives viewers a rare opportunity to experience “the quiet hero of Australian art.”
A Closer Look at Sydney’s Olsen Gallery is the first posthumous survey of Cook’s works since his death in 2015. Among the selection is his final painting, Landscape 1 (2014), indicative of the artist’s remarkable technical ability to paint with near-photographic accuracy. While this is a feat in itself, describing Cook’s practice solely in relation to realism fails to capture the depth of his work.
As gallery director Tim Olsen says: “Bill was able to create works that had no particular focal point, so they take on this abstract quality. Underneath it all, his work possesses something unnerving and disorienting. His paintings are surreal, they’re otherworldly.”
Looking closer, certain elements begin to disrupt the naturality. For one, the paintings are impossibly flat, levelled by Cook’s fastidious application of acrylic paint to intentionally minimise the presence of his brushstrokes. His series of haystacks, for which he is perhaps most widely known, become imposing monuments resembling Greek ruins, rather than an everyday agricultural non-phenomenon. As he achieved acclaim in the 1970s and ’80s, many of Cook’s followers noted that his works felt closer to the sublime than reality.
In this way, Cook is a true modernist, imbuing his panoramas with an atmospheric tension that is largely absent from the settler-colonial landscapes ... Subscribe to read this article in full
