Out There, selection of twenty paintings, drawings and lithographs by the San Francisco artist Gordon Cook (1927-1985), will be one of two exhibitions to inaugurate the new quarters of the Richard Nelson Gallery at University of California, Davis. Opening on January 15, 2011, and continuing until March, the Cook show focuses on Cook’s fascination with water views – including many sites in the Sacramento Delta – at the same time giving a strong sense of the wide range of his work.

A native of Chicago, Cook moved to San Francisco in 1951 and soon became an integral part of the artistic circle that included such Bay Area notables as Wayne Thiebaud, Joan Brown, Robert Arneson and Elmer Bischoff. He was a master printer, a member of the Dolphin Swim and Boating Club, and taught printmaking during the 1960s at the San Francisco Art Institute and later at Sacramento State College (now California State University), UC, Davis, the Academy of Art College and Mills College, Oakland. In 1987, two years after his untimely death, Cook was honored by a full-scale retrospective of his work at the Oakland Museum. His estate is represented by the George Krevsky Gallery, San Francisco.

Beside Cook’s waterscapes, the exhibition includes a number of still-life paintings, vertiginous etchings of the shorelines of the San Francisco headlands, and one example of the ingenious freestanding painted cutout constructions Cook liked to make for his friends and family.