Biography of Roger Cooke, Artist

Roger Cooke's paintings, prints and sculptures are displayed in homes, businesses, and museums across the country. His murals are scattered throughout the United States from West to East, earning him the title "Johnny Appleseed of America's small-town murals".

Thorough research is part of every creative effort. Each work is executed with skill and care. Authenticity gives Cooke's work authority. His artistic talent and love for his subject gives it life.

Since 1971, Cooke's studio on the Sandy River in the mountains of Oregon has produced the fine paintings, bronzes, illustrations, murals and portraits for which Cooke is noted.

As a teenager, his education included an initial interest to pursue a formal art career by enrolling in Art Instruction School's Correspondence Course. After working in the woods for a year, this encouraged him to enroll at Portland State University for two years and then on to the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles for four years, where he majored in illustration, graduating in 1970. He joined Jackson-Zender Studio in Indianapolis, IN for almost two years before venturing to Oregon to begin free-lancing in illustration.

Like many other quality illustrators, his illustration work went to Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Portland, and Cooke was represented through a New York illustration agent. Some of his illustration clients included Saturday Evening Post, Georgia Pacific Corporation, Mayflower Movers, Caterpillar Corporation, NASA, and Milton Bradley.

In 1974, Cooke began his fine arts painting career, painting in oils full time after being introduced to Husberg Fine Arts Gallery of Sedona, Arizona, who sold almost all of Cooke's original Western oil paintings for many years, even after the gallery moved to Scottsdale AZ. Cooke's "signature style" of paintings that look so realistic as to be a photograph, but upon closer examination have a "wash" background and high quality realistic figures and horses, have set him apart from other artists.

National Western Art magazines such as Art West, Southwest Art, Wild West, and Bugle magazine have featured his work.

The public has appreciated the availability ofhis Classic Western Art paintings made into prints and greeting cards through such publishers as the Greenwich Workshop, Leanin' Tree, Antioch Publishers, and The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

These illustrations have been spread like creamy peanut butter across the entire length of the trail in Washington - from Clarkston to Long Beach - a roadside marker project that ineluctably led to the production of a book, Ocian in View! O! the Joy.

In the forward of this book: "Roger is in great demand because of his tangible skill at recreating historical scenes, and especially so during the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, working on projects in other states concurrently with this one in the state of Washington. It is no exaggeration to say that one of the great legacies of the bicentennial [in WA] is the visual record of the Lewis and Clark experience created by Roger for the roadside project..."

Roger and his wife, Edna, who is also the business manager for Roger Cooke Fine Arts, have raised their four children in the beautiful park like mountain setting on the Sandy River, where the view of the river from the living room never grows old. And where Roger's studio continues to allow his creativity to flourish.