Portrait of an Artist: Lisa Cook – From fine art to fun art

By TIM WILCOX

Special to the Alpine Mountaineer

Lisa Cook lives in an art gallery. The walls of her Lake Arrowhead home display paintings she’s created with singular inspiration and skill. Each of them comes with its own story, so this is a residence of many stories – in the figurative sense.

The artist traces her own story to southern Louisiana. Lisa was born in Lake Charles and grew up in New Orleans, some 200 miles to the east. As a schoolgirl in the 1970s, she was taken on field trips to the city’s famed French Quarter.

“On Bourbon Street we passed by the strip clubs, whose doors were usually wide open,” she recalls. “What I saw inside made a strong impression on me.” In fact, those early and indelible impressions would become a primary inspiration for her paintings. She notes, quite eloquently, that “the visual maelstrom of female strippers and dancers in sequins, jewels and stage costumes informs my painting.” So does her extensive collection of vintage burlesque memorabilia and posed pin-up models of the 1940s. Lisa is anything but shy about identifying those particular sources of esthetic inspiration.

She also shares that “my grandmother, my mother and two aunts were all artists. My grandmother in particular taught me drawing. She had an eye for the female figure that I now have and passed on a strong appreciation” for such imagery. Lisa’s mother, Marlene Akeroyd, is a watercolorist who also shows in the Mountain Artists Network (MAN) gallery in Lake Arrowhead Village. Interestingly, Lisa’s husband, Graeme Gale, is a highly skilled woodworker whose creations are on display in the gallery, too.

Lisa and Graeme were founding MAN members in 2006, with Lisa serving as vice president for three years. They were among the small group of artists to exhibit their creations at quarterly shows beginning that year. Among the venues were the old theater in central Crestline and the Burnt Mill Beach Club building on Lake Arrowhead.

Although New Orleans was clearly home, as an adult Lisa returned to Los Angeles, where she’d attended Loyola Marymount University. From 1995 until 2002, she maintained a residence in Louisiana and an apartment in L.A., where she and Graeme owned and operated a record store. After a number of back-and-forth years, circumstances suggested the wisdom of a major relocation. So the couple closed their store, explored Big Bear and finally settled in Lake Arrowhead. They’ve been in the same red residence since 2002, sharing it with Marlene, her husband, David Akeroyd, and six cats.

Reflecting on those more than two decades, Lisa says: “After the initial disappointment of loneliness, we discovered Mountain Arts Network, and our lives changed. Since then we’ve met so many wonderful people and like-minded artists and their families. The bonus is that it’s an absolute paradise here, living in the forest.”

Life-shaping focus

But what about Lisa’s life-shaping focus on art? Much earlier she’d attended the University of New Orleans. “I entered as a pre-med student, intending to become a veterinarian,” she says. “But I quickly learned I was wretched at math so changed my major to art.” Lisa transferred to Loyola Marymount in L.A. in 1982, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in studio and fine arts.

Those studies were focused and serious. She can be both. But Lisa also has a well-developed whimsical side that finds expression, for instance, in three-dimensional, mixed-media artworks.

“My thing was taking Barbie dolls and creating a vignette, painting them and designing clothing for them,” she says. “I’d glue them together and create conjoined triplets, for example – lots of arms and legs. It was definitely strange stuff, which I called my ‘Freak Dolls’ collection.”

Lisa is much more serious about her signature oil-on-canvas paintings. The female form is her principal subject matter, again reflecting the seminal influence of her grandmother. Lisa also credits the oeuvre of Peruvian-American artist Alberto Vargas, whose portraits of Varga (no ‘s’) girls became famous during World War II. Some of those images were prominently reproduced on U.S. military aircraft.

Her extraordinarily detailed and colorful works primarily depict women in varied scenarios, each suggesting some sort of narrative. Initially, the paintings focused on the female subject with a mostly neutral background. “When I moved up to the mountains, though, I was strongly inspired by the forest,” says Lisa. So for more than two decades now, her paintings have included minutely depicted trees, flowers, other foliage and water (often in colors other than blue). And while she renders the details with almost obsessive precision, the overall effect is more surreal than realistic.

One of her series is titled “The Wicked Women of Mythology,” which draws on centuries of lore from multiple cultures. According to Lisa, hallmarks of these and other paintings include “the use of a lot of red, orange and black.” Another primary quality is exceptional blending of the oils, eschewing prominent brushstrokes and creating a strikingly smooth finish with the subjects’ flesh in particular. As for Lisa’s biggest challenge: “It’s hands. I always struggle to get them just right.”

Influence of erotica

Paintings displayed on the walls of Lisa’s home are more explicit than those she shows and sells at MAN’s lakeside gallery. She admits that the influence of vintage erotica going back to Civil War times and burlesque, especially from the 1940s to ’60s, is much more apparent at home.

Incidentally, some of the artist’s more “modest” paintings have been reproduced on labels of GEN 7 wines, a celebrated vineyard in Napa Valley. Also, the works are complemented by rustic wooden frames made by her husband, Graeme.

Amazingly, Lisa is a master jeweler as well. Tracing her interest in this art form to the early 1980s, she’s been refining her craft ever since. Incorporating various ingredients such as semiprecious gemstones, beads (ceramic, acrylic and glass), freshwater pearls, pendants and charms, the necklaces, bracelets and earrings are boldly textured and dramatically colorful.

Some reveal an idiosyncratic sense of humor. With a nod to the macabre, for instance, Lisa has developed a collection she calls “Murder Jewelry.” Featuring elements such as bloody-knife charms, “the bracelets and earrings are really popular,” she says. Then, with an ironic smile, she admits, “Worryingly, children in particular love them and ask, ‘Can we get this or that for my mom?’ ” Playful and popular, too, is her jewelry starring rubber duckies.

Obviously talented and successful, Lisa is refreshingly modest, too: “I look at some of the pieces I’ve done and see all the problems with them. I never fully attain what I set out to do, at least not in my own mind. I’m always determined to edge closer and closer to that elusive ideal!”

Such is a portrait of an accomplished and widely collected artist who appears to have mastered two art forms but remains a creative work in progress herself.

Lisa Cook’s paintings and jewelry are on display in the MAN gallery on the lower level of Lake Arrowhead Village. Her email address is lisalcook@charter.net.