Barrie Cooke

Fenton Gallery, Cork

Alberta, Canada, The Edmonton Art Gallery, The Fifth Province: Some Contemporary Irish Art

Right hand side: Original canvas. The varnish appears slightly uneven. A faint surface abrasion running along the length of the right vertical edge. A spot of paint loss near centre of lower edge. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Left hand side: Original canvas. There are some faint craquelure patterns in the lower half of the canvas and mainly around the figure. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Unframed.
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Barrie Cooke's understanding of the natural world and man's relation to it was the driving force in his artistic output, which found expression in various forms. Cooke lived immersed in the countryside within sparse surroundings, practically self-sufficient as a fisherman and game-hunter, and it was this direct experience of rural life, rather than as a passer-by or outsider, that gives his work its powerful authenticity.

Cooke first came across Irish elks when visiting a friend in Trinity College, Dublin. One of the largest species of deer that ever lived, the monumentality of the animal inspired the artist, who made charcoal drawings of the skeletal displays, working them into larger paintings over the following years. In the present work, Cooke also introduces the mythical figure of Sweeney from the Irish medieval poem Buile Suibhne (Sweeney's Frenzy), which recounts the legendary tale of the pagan King Sweeney, cursed with madness by Saint Ronan Finn after an altercation with a bishop. Banished to the wilderness, Sweeney roamed the land naked and bird-like, from tree top to tree top. In the present work, Cooke depicts Sweeney's encounter with the magnificent Irish elk, before which he is a lowly, solitary figure. 

The story of Sweeney also appeared in the poetry of Cooke's close contemporaries, John Montague and Seamus Heaney, and just as they poetically brought the figure to life, here too Cooke provides his painterly interpretation. As commented in the exhibition catalogue for Cooke's show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 'the Irish elk's semi-reality (its existence only through fossil record and imagination) is conflated with that of the mythological bird-king (a story born in imagination and fossilized in a poem)' (Karen Sweeney, 2011, p.23).