I invite you to read and follow my Art and Tulips posts where I regularly add new work and offer my thoughts about art at http://www.artulips.wordpress.com
Perhaps it was the 50-color paint set my grandmother bought me when I was nine that got me started as an artist. Or perhaps it was the technicolor movies, especially the ones by Walt Disney who animated music with color. Or it may have been my first college art history class where I fell in love with the wild and vivid colors of Raoul Dufy and the Fauves (as well as my art history professor) when I was eighteen.
Whatever it was, including work with charcoal and pastels, clay, collage, or pen and ink, I’ve been hooked on color ever since.
As an artist, poet, playwright, performer and jazz aficionado, I’m particularly interested in how color and rhythm come together in the painted, spoken or musical expression of an artistic creation. I’m especially drawn to abstract expressionism which allows me to experiment and create within the boundaries I set for myself. Abstract expressionism also invites viewers to write the narrative, to discover their own stories, poems or songs in a painting.
I was born in Oregon, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, moved to other places around the country, and returned to Oregon in the fall of 2019.
As a self- and studio-taught artist, I have training in art and art history from Maine College of Art; Montserrat College of Art and Endicott College in Massachusetts; Oregon State University and workshops on both coasts from Cape Ann on the Atlantic to Seattle and San Diego on the Pacific.
In my “other life,” I’m an award-winning poet/writer and former actress/playwright who keeps her hand and her heart in all corners of the creative world. Before working full time as an artist, I taught creative writing and published a jazz novel, Listen. I continue to write and publish poetry, teach occasionally, and to write about jazz and art. I’m serious about my work in both art and writing, but I don’t take life too seriously. And I listen to live jazz any chance I get.
Molly Larson Cook Art 