Barrie C. Cooke (1931 – 4 March 2014) was an English-born Irish abstract expressionist painter.
Cooke was born in Knutsford, to an English father and an American mother, and spent share of his childhood in Jamaica and Bermuda, before touching to the U.S. in 1947, where he studied art records at Harvard University. He moved to Ireland in 1954, and in 1955 went to Salzburg to study below Austrian performer Oskar Kokoschka. His function is represented in such collections as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Ulster Museum, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Haags Gemeentemuseum (The Hague), and supplementary public and private collections worldwide.
He was a buddy and co-conspirator of both Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, illustrating Hughes’s “The Great Irish Pike” (1982) and Heaney’s Bog Poems (1975).
The Barrie Cooke archive which contains letters and poems from friends, including Heaney and Hughes is at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
He died in 2014 in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland.
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