Barrie Cooke

Barrie Cooke was an English-born Irish painter, born in Knutsford, who studied art history at Harvard before moving to Ireland in 1954 and studying with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg. He painted the Irish landscape, water, fish and the human body in loose, expressive paint, and in the 1980s and 1990s made works about acid rain and the pollution of lakes and rivers. A keen angler, he was a close friend of the poet Ted Hughes, with whom he fished in Ireland. His work is in the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum.