Birdwatching: Jonathan Delafield Cook

About

Jonathan Delafield Cook is amongst a new generation of artists who are rediscovering draughtsmanship. Rather than employing charcoal and pencil simply in preliminary studies he has examined what the process might yield as a medium with an end in itself. In doing this he has returned to the history of ornithological illustration. His work attests to his admiration for that tradition, yet by subtly altering its conventions — enlarging scales, delving too far into detail, mixing the symbols into a confusion of opposites — he has developed a contemporary vision which is not simply a bedrock of unshakeable truths, but a thing as vulnerable as life itself. In 2004 Jonathan Delafield Cook exhibited in The Flower as Image at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark with, amongst others, David Hockney, Jeff Koons and Robert Mapplethorpe and Flower Myth at the Beyeler Foundation, Basel the following year. He was the recipient of the Darwin Scholarship at the Royal College of Art, following his training with Riken Yamamoto in Japan, where he won awards for his architectural drawing.