William Delafield COOK

Australian 1936–2015
worked throughout Europe 1963–2015

William Delafield Cook drew this stark still life in a studio at the University of Melbourne, where he was artist in residence between 1975 and mid 1977. It is part of a series of drawings of fruit and vegetables that he began in London in 1972, after being struck by the strange sight of cabbages and celery suspended outside a local greengrocer’s shop. In their extraordinary precision and attention to detail these drawings exemplify Cook’s great skill as a draughtsman.

Cook’s distinctive realist drawings first appeared in the late 1960s when the artist turned his attention to items of furniture in his London house in a deliberate effort to extend and refine his drawing skills. These chairs and couches, typically depicted in isolation or in pairs and without any surrounding details, assumed an ‘uncanny presence’ which connected with the artist’s own sense of ‘the strangeness of the real world, as it is’.1 This recognition and enjoyment of the surreal qualities revealed by familiar objects removed from their everyday context is sustained throughout the fruit and vegetable works. In drawings such as Three cabbages, 1977, we are compelled to look at the unique form, structure and texture of the subject and, perhaps, to see it like never before.

Always black and white, the drawings are made using charcoal and conté, often applied in multiple layers. Some are drawn directly from the object, while others are worked up from photographs taken by the artist as aides-memoire. Cook’s fascination with early photography is evident in the grainy quality of the drawings, as well as the way in which the subjects appear to emerge out of the dark ground. These drawings also borrow elements from the long artistic tradition of still life that precedes them; here incorporating an imperfection in the cabbage on the left in order to remind the viewer of the transience and fragility of the natural world.2

1  D. Hart, William Delafield Cook, Sydney, 1998, p. 65.

2  ibid., p. 129.

Kirsty M. Grant