Robert D. Cocke

Cocke was born in 1950 to James and Marjorie Cocke, Americans living in Salzburg, Austria during James's service as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. In 1960, the family settled in Tucson, Arizona. He studied art at the University of Arizona (BFA, 1972), before attending the University of Iowa, where he earned an MA in studio art in 1974 and an MFA in 1975. "Visions of America, 1787-1987" (ACA Galleries, New York), "Evidence: Contemporary Narrative Painters of the Southwest" (San Antonio Museum of Art, 1989), Later in his career he appeared in "Transcending Earth and Sky" (San Diego State University, 2000), "Big City: Cityscapes and Urban Life from the Collection" (Phoenix Art Museum, 2006), and "Trouble in Paradise" (Tucson Museum of Art, 2009). ==Work and reception==

Critic Peter Frank wrote that Cocke emerged in the 1980s as a "peculiarly Western-style funk-expressionist painter" whose imagery was by turns "exuberant and nightmarish … and marked by an odd, contemplative sense of groundedness." Discussing later works, such as The Quest for Knowledge (1989), Robert Cauthorn identified a more introspective, spiritual dimension amid the desolation: "Cocke's work is a study in planes of existence: virtue vs. corruption, the natural world vs. technology … The battleground for these factions is our spirit." Influenced by the Hudson River School, these paintings revealed a "dual desire to mirror nature and depart from it," During this period, Cocke reintroduced signs of human presence into his landscapes—usually unconventional objects (antique toys, stones, seedpods, keys, penny banks, lipsticks) in enigmatic, stream-of-conscious arrangements that sat in tension with their natural settings. His later paintings (e.g., Rendezvous, 2016) often depict miniature worlds or forlorn tableaus set against distant cities, landscapes or figures, which critics suggested evoke tender sadness or resignation, relieved by the freedom conveyed by vast skies. ==Public collections and awards==

Cocke's work belongs to the public collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, South Dakota Memorial Art Center, University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, and Tucson Museum of Art, among others. He has received awards and grants from the Ford Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum/The Contemporary Forum, and National Endowment for the Arts/Western States Arts Federation, and juried awards from the Contemporary Arts Center, Mesa and Yuma Art Center, among others. ==References==