Lynette Cook | Down to Earth

Former astronomical illustrator Lynette Cook now celebrates urban architecture

By Norman Kolpas

On a fire escape above the bustling streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, a woman hangs laundry out to dry. The colorful assortment of T-shirts, trousers, and undergarments contrasts gaily with the painted-steel landings and ladders, the makeshift clotheslines, and the rich ornamentation of the structure, built in the years following the massive 1906 earthquake. Enhancing the impeccably detailed scene even more are the shadows cast by the bright morning sun—a latticework as sharply defined as the building, the clothing, and the dignified mother or grandmother performing her daily tasks.

Yes, the scene faithfully captures A MOMENT IN TIME, as the photorealistic acrylic painting is titled. But it also expresses so much more. “One of my motivations in choosing my imagery is to celebrate and call attention to the beauty in that which is ordinary,” says Lynette Cook, the Bay Area artist who created the work. “I see value and loveliness in what many people pass by.”

Over the past decade, Cook has embarked on an intensive, joyful exploration of vintage buildings and the lives of the people who live in them, whether expressed in overt elements or subtle touches. “My art celebrates that spark in the human spirit which motivates and inspires a person of limited means to dream of and strive for a life with purpose and meaning,” she explains. “I think about immigrants who leave their homes and all they know and come to a country where they don’t know the language or the customs. That takes courage. I admire this. I wonder if I could do it.”

Although Cook has not crossed the seas or trekked for hundreds of miles to make a new life for herself, she has nonetheless faced adversity and triumphed over it. As an artist, she has also boldly forged a new path for herself since 2010, when she changed the trajectory of her career from respected and successful illustrator to artful chronicler of urban buildings and the lives lived within them.

From her earliest memories of making art, Cook found pleasure and satisfaction in faithfully depicting the world around her. The basement of her family’s four-story home in the small southern Illinois town of Herrin featured an art room for Lynette and her older sister. That’s where Cook remembers reproducing the images she found in field guides to birds and flowers and mushrooms, using tempera paints on sheets of paper or on smooth stones she’d gathered on vacation visits to the Great Lakes.

Creativity ran in her family. “My mother did a lot of interior decorating as a homemaker,” she says of the drapes and bedspreads and clothes her mom fashioned. One of Lynette’s great-grandmothers had done some painting. And there was even an illustrious artist in the family: Doris Steider, a cousin of her mother’s they called “Aunt Doris,” who had gained renown in New Mexico for her realist egg-tempera paintings of the Southwest. Young Lynette corresponded by letter with Aunt Doris, who most memorably advised her, Cook recalls, that she should “develop a unique, precise signature to sign my paintings.”

At Herrin High School, Cook was “the go-to person, apparently” for class art projects, her most public achievement being a mural for the homecoming dance that reproduced the spectral cover art from Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven album. Her talent and strong test scores won her early admission and a partial four-year scholarship to Mississippi University for Women, where she earned both a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, thinking she might combine the two skills to become a scientific illustrator. With that goal in mind, she was admitted to a master’s program at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland.

After her first year there, Cook earned internships at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, including part-time exhibition art assignments for its Morrison Planetarium. A year later, master’s degree in hand, she became a staff artist and photographer at the planetarium, where she worked for the next 16 years.

During that time, Cook particularly savored “speculative work on what extrasolar planets looked like”—realistic depictions, based in science, of planets beyond our own solar system, “artwork of objects nobody had ever seen before.” The intellectual process itself thrilled her. “The astronomer would discuss what type of star a planet is orbiting, such as a yellowish sunlike star or a red dwarf; what the planet’s mass is, if it’s a rocky body like Mercury or a gas giant like Jupiter; and the distance between the star and the planet. If it was close, the planet may be hot or somewhat molten; and if distant, it could be very cold. Is there water, with a habitable zone like Earth’s, with lakes and oceans? Is the outer edge of the habitable zone frozen, with ice or snow?” Then, Cook would study existing photos of planets in our solar system before “using science-guided imagination to fill in the blanks.”

Along the way, she took on similar freelance assignments, and then in 2001 became a full-time self-employed illustrator working for a wide range of clients, from astronomical magazines and books to NASA projects to the Gemini observatories in Hawaii and Chile. Cook’s work was widely exhibited in science museums and exhibitions of scientific illustration. Her colleagues in the International Association of Astronomical Artists bestowed upon her the designation of Fellow.

Throughout those years, Cook thought about creating fine art—a term that, upon consideration, is an odd distinction, since her illustrations required an equally “fine” set of skills and talents. But she never pursued it. “My illustration work took so much time, a 24-7 endeavor,” she says.

All that changed in 2009, when Cook was diagnosed with cancer. While going through treatments in 2010, which ultimately proved successful, she gave herself “more time for looking inward,” including meditation practices. She came out of the process resolved to “shift my focus to painting” in the many years she had ahead of her. “I’m going strong now, and we have longevity genes in my family,” she says.

She began with a series of paintings inspired by photos she had taken on a trip with her mother (who’s now 89 years old) to visit the Great Wall of China in 2007. “Those images stuck in my head,” Cook says. “I loved the brick texture, and being in the watchtowers, and looking out of the arched doorways and windows.” She entitled the resulting painting series Praesentia, a Latin term for the state of being present, a perfect expression for the outlook she desired moving forward in her life and work.

From there, Cook produced three series of 50 small works each for annual fundraisers at the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, south of San Francisco. The first year, she focused on 50 visual treasures within 15 minutes of her home in nearby Daly City; the next year, 50 subjects within 5 miles of her home; and the third year, 50 sights along San Francisco’s 49-Mile Scenic Drive. Some paintings included shadows cast by balconies and laundry. “People really liked those pieces,” she recalls. “And I also enjoyed doing them.”

Those successes led to the first two in a series of larger pieces called Shadows and Silhouettes. One, depicting laundry drying outside a Chinatown window, was accepted into an exhibition at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, CA, in 2013. That’s where Andra Norris of the Andra Norris Gallery in Burlingame first spotted Cook’s work and asked to represent her. She’s been showing the artist’s paintings ever since.

Cook has continued to go from strength to strength in her new fine-art career, refining her focus on stately urban buildings and their inhabitants. The work undeniably brings her joy. “Wandering around San Francisco is, for me, an exploration. I constantly feel I’m discovering new things I haven’t seen before and want to paint.” Consider, for example, 20/20 VISION, which strays somewhat from her typical Chinatown subject matter in depicting a building she spied in an industrial section of the city near Potrero Hill. “I parked my car near the building, looked up, and said to myself, ‘My goodness, I really need to photograph this!’” The shadows in particular fascinated her. “They’re primary to me—a beautiful symbiosis between the man-made town and nature,” she says. “They appear only because the sun is out.”

Back in her home studio, she selected and edited in Photoshop a reference photo for what would become a 60-by-30-inch vertical diptych, one of the largest works she’s done. She printed out the photo in 8½-by-19-inch strips from which she produced contour line drawings on tracing paper. Then she used graphite transfer paper to imprint the lines on a canvas she’d already given five coats of sanded gesso. “Then I mixed up my paints”—she works in acrylics, which dry fast and are relatively fume-free—“and started painting,” working on whatever part of the image “strikes me at the moment.” It’s precise, painstaking work, demanding all the skills she’s honed throughout her career. The diptych took her about eight solid weeks to create.

Now deeply satisfied in her new chosen direction, Cook happily sees no end to her earthbound investigations. “I finally saw the value of settling in one place and exploring it to its fullest,” she says. “I feel I have not gotten even halfway through exploring the shadows yet. And I’m not ready to quit.”

representation

Andra Norris Gallery, Burlingame, CA.

This story appeared in the February 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.