Beschreibung:

Barrie Cooke HRHA (1931-2014) Forest Light (Borneo Series) Oil on canvas, 61 x 45.7cm (24 x 18¾'') Signed and dated (19)'76 verso Exhibited: 'Barrie Cooke Exhibition', David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, April/May 1976, Catalogue No.21, where purchased by current owner. The artist wrote about his trip to Malaya and Borneo in the 1976 catalogue: "These paintings are the result of a stay of three months in the equitorial forests of Malaya and Borneo. They are an effort to explain to myself something of the complication and vitality of what I experienced there. That a certain bamboo can grow ten inches in a day and die in a couple of months I had guessed at, having seen spring corn shoot in cold Kilkenny (and tomatoes erupt in a hot-house), but that this could take place beside a tree 200 feet tall and as many years old, I found hard to reconcile. I have always imagined process; now I began to realise that it was my good fortune during those weeks in the tropics to live inside the most intense, diverse and complex ecological system remaining on this earth. Nowhere else is there such heat, such rain, such sun, such dark. All forming; all adjusting; all competing; all supporting. Nowhere else can 30 sorts of leaves from half-an-inch to three feet across be found in a space of 10 cubic feet. Rain forest is a state of the world where Form as we normally sense it, jelled and realizable, hardly exists."