Creative Output
His works include Hot and Wet and Ship of Fools. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Cook was a prolific cartoonist for the now-defunct National Times. In fact, a great many readers found that Cook's cartoons constituted a good reason in themselves for purchasing the newspaper.
The satire of Cook is notable in that it considers nothing to be sacred. Unlike many others of his generation, Cook avoids an obvious political agenda, and this fact makes him consistently unpredictable. His hostile depiction of Harry Seidler's functionalist, Bauhaus-type architecture in one of his cartoons resulted in Seidler suing him; Seidler lost.
Cook combines great cartooning gifts with a sharp prose idiom. His column "Not the News" has run in various publications since the National Times, most recently in The Bulletin.
Some of Cook's brilliance has also been evident in his puppetry designs for a TV news satire. He also writes scripts for many TV comedies.
Most visibly, his cartoon style has been a big influence on many other Australian artists. The style is both minimalist and organic, ranging from his homicidal wine-swilling koalas to overwrought politicians and social climbers.
An autobiographical article by Cook for The Bulletin during July 2006 explains, with characteristic black comedy in both its words and its illustrations, the medical treatment he has lately undergone.
The 1980 Fontana Collins publication Us and Them contains over 100 early works by Patrick Cook.
The book cover features an attack of the killer koalas type cartoon that is typical of Cook's irreverent, playful manner.
Allen and Unwin published a further expanded collection of his works in 1985 under the title of The Great Big Cook Book.
His career also included being a puppeteer.
Read more about this topic: Patrick Cook
Famous quotes containing the words creative and/or output:
“At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they’ll be creative about it, and do something good besides.”
—Lester Bangs (1948–1982)
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)