Lisa Cook was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and raised in New Orleans. Lisa Cook spent much of her childhood in the shadow of the infamous French Quarter. The visual maelstrom of female strippers and dancers in sequins, jewels, and stage costumes informs her painting, as does her extensive collection of vintage burlesque memorabilia and posed pin-up models of the 1940’s. Tamer influences, of Austrian painter Egon Schiele, New Orleans artist Georg Rodrigue, and Alberto Vargas are also acknowledged by Cook.

Lisa Cook is the author of Consecrated Ground (1998), an extensive collection of her black and white photographs of historic New Orleans cemeteries and grave monuments. Her book was a reference for the New Orleans Police and private concerns to return a large quantity of recovered stolen funerary monuments to the original gravesites.

Lisa Cook has a Bachelor of Arts in Studio and Fine Arts from Loyola Marymount University. Never far from her work, Cook has chosen to maintain her studio and many works-in-progress in her home in the mountains. She relishes the immediacy of painting when instincts and impulses demand such activity. Though academically informed, Cook found the rigid structure of academic art classes less than pleasurable for the most part, as this was not in congruence with her working processes and her chosen artistic direction. She treasures the wisdom of an excellent professor, Rudolph Fleck from whom she learned philosophies and theories of art.

Cook’s painting techniques evolved as she experimented on her own with media and artist’s tools, refining what succeeds for her work and discarding what does not. The result is an undeniably unique artist’s voice and vision. Cook is driven with an artist’s passion to encounter, and in painting, this exploration results in acknowledgement of beauty in what is often maligned or passed over.

Lisa Cook lives in Lake Arrowhead, CA., with her husband Graeme Gale, six cats, and an eclectic collection of vintage burlesque memorabilia.