Jonathan Delafield Cook’s intricate works in charcoal explore the connection between art, science, and nature and reflect his vast curiosity and knowledge drawn from close observation as well as the rich tradition of natural history illustration. His works highlight the complex beauty of the world that surrounds us, from animate to inanimate elements.
Farm animals form the principal subject of Delafield Cook’s 2026 exhibition, with life size charcoal drawings of bulls, a goat and sheep, as well as smaller scale drawings of poppies and feathers, all drawn with extraordinary precision.
Ian Warrell writes,
Over the years Jonathan Delafield Cook has compiled his own encyclopedia of wonderful things – a kind of personal ark that preserves each item as a unique charcoal drawing. The things he selects for his intense scrutiny are most often seen in profile, as if preserved in a kind of airless formaldehyde. They line up in the mind’s eye like the bottled creatures that adorn laboratories. Even individually, the drawings imply a desire to classify the particularities of their subjects, while also hinting at a larger taxonomical purpose. And it is precisely the individuality of each thing that invites us to join the artist in detecting what makes them so remarkable. Each form is recreated with such meticulous attention to detail that we understand implicitly that these images sit on the threshold of scientific enquiry. And yet ultimately every one of them is based on subjective impressions, resulting from repeated observation and acquired knowledge, rather than being a transcription of a single photographic moment.
Whether sketching immense beings such as a sperm whale or a rhino, or much more modest entities like the barnacles that intrigued Charles Darwin (1809-82), there is a precision and specificity to the images Delafield Cook produces. But they are perhaps better thought of as portraits of each creature, with all the expectations of that genre. Indeed, rather than the strictures of a purely scientific approach, Delafield Cook’s work involves a much more individual response. In preparing an image, he makes use of photographs. But these are reference points only, resembling the preliminary studies a portraitist might make from a model, or the plein air sketches a landscape artist formerly painted on the spot in order to produce a masterwork back in the studio. In his studio, Delafield Cook sifts and unites his photographic sources to create a composite that is rooted in direct observation, but which evolves through a process of imaginative discovery. The use of charcoal as his medium is central to this revelation. He builds up a body of marks on his sheet. This permits the flexibility to improvise and to revise an image as it develops. Areas that dissatisfy the artist can be reworked in charcoal, and recast as new forms. As he works from dark to light, there is almost a sense of him plucking his images from the blackness. To appreciate fully the miraculous subtleties of his technique you need to get close to the drawings; there you see the speckled, blurred and rubbed surface as a subject in itself.
