I was born in Topeka, Kansas and was raised in the ranching country called the Flint Hills.  I studied painting in Kansas schools and taught painting and drawing at the University of Arizona for about seven years.  In 1978 I left teaching to devote my full time to studio practice in Tucson, Arizona, and Eskridge, Kansas, where we maintain studios.  My wife, the painter DeAnn Melton, and I have a daughter, Ellen Cook.  Ellen is a young sculptor.

What place can you see for landscape painting in a contemporary art environment where painting seems to be increasingly marginalized?

I do not see painting marginalized.  It was thought to be sometime ago, but my experience is to the contrary.  I see thousands of artists working in all forms of painting.  The market place is awash with everything from abstract to plein-air work of all sorts.  To be sure, the universities in the US have ceased teaching easel painting for the most part, but the market is full of works of art and sales are good.  I do think that the markets have changed.  The mountain west, Texas, and the new south have collectors with distinctive tastes.  Once these collectors might have gone to New York to spend their art dollars, but I think that has changed.  As a consequence the landscape and culture of these parts of the US are more represented in paintings by artists who work there.
    
Which artists or individuals have had the greatest impact on the development of your own work?

Diebenkorn, DeKooning, Turner, Monet, Auerbach

What role can the painted image have in an culture where visual media has become increasingly devalued through mass reproduction?

Great things are handmade

Contemporary art is becoming increasingly eclectic - the playing field is leveling in terms of the relevance of various movements and ism's. Do you think this will allow landscape painting the opportunity to be recognized again as an important and vital medium within contemporary painting? 

I believe that landscape painting has been the form of expression through which modern painting was formed.  A living dialogue exists between the works of Turner, Constable, Monet, Cezanne, Diebenkorn, and Auerbach which transmits ideas to us and artists not yet born.  It is through new formal ideas that we find beauty in our environment.  If it were not for Turner or Sheeler, how could we live in our cities?  Without Monet and Renoir, how could we find our middle class lives tolerable?

What place does 'gesture", the vitality of mark making play in your own work, and what can this express to the viewer?

I have tried to find a form of painting that speaks to me from the canvas the way nature stimulates my eye.  I find the physical and plastic qualities of paint very stimulating.  The challenge is to give to the painted surface the ring of truth and not just the slap dash of gesture.

What can the painted image express that the photograph cannot?

I find no relationship between painting and photography.

The point between abstraction and realism can be subtle within the painted landscape, how would you describe this relationship?

All painting is abstract.