Throughout his work Michael Cook has conflated painting pictorial conventions and practice to question their distance from authentic experience. Early work used atomic particle images from electron accelerators, which at first glance appear as self-referential formalist compositions. In one of his most recent bodies of work, first glance gives the impression of expressionist works but they also come directly from a source outside of themselves or art historical reference, the highways we travel. In both instances the work is a direct reference to the external reality and questions what is a “real” image.
Michael Cook has also explored the definition of landscape in his art for over 30 years. Expanding the understanding of " landscape" beyond the literal image of geography has been at the core of his concerns. Landscape can be understood from a multitude of perspectives. There is the cultural landscape, the scientific landscape, the political landscape, the economic landscape, the ecological landscape and the historical landscape among many others. For example, artists such as Cole, Church, Homer, Hopper, Benton, Pollock and Warhol are all within a tradition that has been influenced by the landscape to very different ends. We are residents of a culture constantly in the process of reinventing itself, which is concerned with issues of identity, derived from but separate of the European experience and constantly influenced by a diversity of world culture. Landscape continues to be a defining element of the American experience.