Drew Cooke

Visual Art – New Orleans

I was born in New Orleans in 1978. I took interest in art at a young age as my parents and older sister enjoyed viewing, as well as creating art. My sole ambition until my early teens was to be a visual artist, but I became enchanted by music, then mathematics, then writing, but then was back to the visual arts. In 2000, I had my first gallery appearance in New Orleans with colored-pencil sketches of Degas’ Dancers at the now defunct Diva Gallery. Soon after, I began experimenting with a variety of common materials to create a new relief painting method. I continued developing the style as I moved to Oklahoma in 2002 to work on mathematics and English degrees. I soon was mastering the new style and producing large amounts on it, making over 40 relief paintings, 50 pineapples, a variety of flatworks, and a conceptual collection based around each week’s garbage. The culmination of this period was having 5 works included in a lower-Manhattan Chelsea gallery in November 2006. Recently returning to New Orleans, I have setup a new workspace which is fostering my best work yet. Currently in production are 10 new pineapples with some bold new palettes, a long skinny piece with many small people extending out, a couple cityscape reliefs, and a new series of flatworks focusing on figurative abstractions.