Nigel Cooke Quotes

There are certain times when a painting accelerates beyond you, and you have to try and understand and catch up with it.

The moment is never perfect. It's like that right now - in my head I'm being super lucid, but you never are. You're always fumbling.

The paintings are kind of set in the past, present, and future all at once.

I'm a quiet person, I'm not a flashy art world person. I'm in the studio in the middle of nowhere. There's sheep and fields. The work has to be authentic in that way.

Using painting as a metaphor for consciousness is what I'm interested in.

I felt like I had reached the end of a period of life, where the work was jumping about and pushing something new every time. I wanted to dial it back and create a language that was stable and deep.

There are things that inform the works, but that doesn't go anywhere near what you're actually looking at.