Rife's Market by Amanda Hope Cook
Glowing with Pride
Influenced by her artist father, urban painter Amanda Hope Cook documents vintage neon signs
When Nashville native Amanda Hope Cook brought her artistic talent to Columbus, she began simultaneously preserving and elevating a declining art: landmark urban signs.
Cook’s art demonstrates how lettering, lighting and bold color can portray an entire city or culture. The paintings, packed with local personality, also contribute to the conservation of vintage signs.
Cook began painting when she was only 2 years old. Cook – heavily influenced by her father, Marion B. Cook – reminisces about their connection as artists, recalling that before he became a full-time artist, he was a sign painter for local businesses in Nashville.
“I remember driving around with him when I was a child,” Cook says. “He would point out signs on the sides of old brick buildings that he’d worked on.”
"Buckeye Donuts" by Amanda Hope Cook
Glowing with Pride
She also describes the connection to him that resonates from her childhood.
“I would sit on his studio floor and just paint,” she says.
After building a strong foundation in drawing and painting, she was awarded a scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design, where she double majored in fine art and illustration and minored in visual communications.
After working full-time in museums from 1999 to 2006, Cook would only paint when she had the chance, creating still lifes and traditional landscapes. She finally found her niche when she started a new series titled Looking Up.
At first, her subject matter included drifting clouds, street signs and high-strung wires. By simply looking slightly “lower and lower” in the landscape, she says, she found her true passion: recreating urban signs in oil paint.
Looking Up is a series “in which she hopes to reveal a thing of beauty in an object that sits dormant against a boundless sky and is often only seen from a distance,” according to Cook’s website. “Observing the finest of detail, she recreates the way the sunlight glistens off of a curve, or the range of transparencies the shadows of the tubing cast onto the painted letters of the surface below.”
"Fireproof" by Amanda Hope Cook
Glowing with Pride
Cook, whose work is strikingly photographic, does not simply copy a single photograph. All of her work is visualized from several photographs she takes herself. She also creates a unique representation: adding more saturation or glow from the neon signs, for example.
“I create paintings from different times of day or night,” she says. “It creates interest by adding different light and shadow. Sometimes a single light bulb burns out, and it creates a whole different look.”
Subjects in central Ohio have included signs for the North Market, Rife’s Market, the Book Loft, Drexel Theater and even Buckeye Donuts.
As part of a new project, Cook is currently recreating the myriad of neon signs from the movie Cars. Reproductions of her work can even be found in the Off the Page Gallery at Disneyland. Now, she is working on the second in the upcoming series of about a dozen.
Cook often has at least four paintings in progress at once. She describes rotating between each one, explaining with a laugh, “It’s not as organized as it sounds.”
Glowing with Pride
Cook’s work is represented in galleries across the nation. Locally, it can be seen at Sharon Weiss Gallery. It’s also on display at Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland, Haynes Galleries of Nashville, Gallery Asheville of Asheville, N.C. and Beverly McNeil Gallery of Birmingham, Ala.
Corinne Murphy is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
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-Steven Walker, also represented by Sharon Weiss Gallery
