From the Delta to the Nile

RIVER VALLEY and OZARK AREA — Maumelle artist David Paul Cook often lets his imagination run wild as he paints. He encourages his students to do the same.

A landscape painting instructor at the Arkansas Arts Center’s Museum School in Little Rock, Cook is winding down a course he titles “Painting the Landscape - Egypt in Arkansas.” He said the class relates to “The World of the Pharaohs” exhibit currently on display at the arts center.

Cook said administrators of the museum school requested facultymembers to tie their classes to that exhibit soon after it was announced that the exhibit would come to Little Rock.

He took that request to heart and spent the summer painting a series of watercolors showing the similarities between the Arkansas River Delta and the Nile River Valley. “I wondered how I could paint Egypt in Arkansas,” he said. “I knew they weren’t going to send me to Cairo.

“The more I thought about it, I began to see some parallels. Egypt has the Nile and Nile River Valley; we have the Arkansas and the Delta - the same kind of flat land. Egypt has pyramids and monuments; wehave the Toltec Mounds at Scott and towering grain elevators.

“Egypt has cotton, and so do we. Egypt has oases; we have tree-canopied small towns surrounded by flat land.”

Cook said the more he thought about it, “I decided I needed to get out there and paint, and see the world.”

He said he spent “day after day” on site, visiting Scott and England “on that side of the Arkansas River,” and then Little Rock and Redfield “on the other side of the river.

“That was a whole new environ-ment for me, the River Delta,” he said.

By the time he was finished, Cook had amassed 43 paintings and 120 black and white photographs. Among the paintings are 18 “large” paintings,” he pointed out, explaining, “Some of the countryside could not be contained in a smaller size.”

“Some day I’ll bring all of this out in a major show,” he said.

Cook said painting the Toltec Mounds located at Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park was interesting.

“After I painted the first painting, I decided it absolutely had to have a human figure in it to show scale,” he said.

Cook has some of these paintings set up in the classroomwhere he teaches at the Arkansas Arts Center, and some are on display at The Sage House Gallery at White Wagon Farm in Maumelle, where he also teaches. He also has sketchbooks of the time he spent in the Arkansas Delta.

“They are like journals for me,” he said, smiling, noting that he keeps notes in those books as well. “That’s where you get a lot of your inspiration,” he said. “You go to the sketchbook and you are able to pull back memories and bring back the day you were there. I can see what I was seeing then, even hear and smell what I was hearing and smelling that day.”

Cook said he wants his students “to think of Egypt as a live place. That’s what this project is meant to do, to provide another way for people to think about that environment.”

A native of Wisconsin, Cook and his wife, Elaine, moved to Little Rock in 1985, when he accepted the position of state director of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Lung Association. He joined several organizations and took various workshops. Since his retirement in 2000, he often conducts workshops and is the coordinator of the Plein Air Painters of Arkansas. He is past president of the Arkansas League of Artists, a member of the Conway League of Artists and serves on the board of the Mid-Southern Watercolorists.

Each summer, he takes time off from teaching and devotes it to painting. “Last summer, I did a series of oils,” he said. “I always seem to be able to find myself some mischief to get into.” - crolf@ arkansasonline.com

River Valley Ozark, Pages 139 on 11/15/2009

Print Headline: MAUMELLE From the Delta