There is a quality of daring to Francis Cook’s ink drawings. It is almost always the case that when ink (unlike most other drawing media) is committed to the page, it is final. This is especially the case in the drawings of Cook, who uses an undiluted black sumi ink. All the hazy, blurry, washy marks and subtle tonal gradations that might otherwise offer a kind of cover for the artist are unavailable to her. There are no tricks, no hiding: only the black ink and the white page, only lines and shapes.

Within these rudimentary parameters, her figures are rendered with a certain economy of means. They are simple but never lazy: executed quickly but not sloppily or sketchily. This body of work is exacting—a product of careful attention, distillation, and organization.

From the first mark, these drawings are informed by the page on which they reside. The rectangle becomes both a character and a container. Cook is always attentive to the visual power of this rectangle—to the edges and corners, to the forms that fill them, and to the spaces in between. At the New York Studio School where Cook studied, the former dean Graham Nickson often reminded students that a line has two sides. In Cook’s drawings, both are always considered. Lines exist not merely as records of contour but as dividers of space and makers of geometry. Cook’s lines are structurally necessary. In this, her kinship (and debt) to Richard Diebenkorn becomes evident. Among many other things, Diebenkorn was one of the great designers of the human figure, and Cook follows his lead. She nudges her figures into a geometric structure- cropping knees, stretching torsos, building new relationships of proportion and scale.

Many of these drawings might be called portraits, but Cook resists the conventions of the genre. She is not bound by the constraints of aristocratic commissions or court paintings that plagued portraitists of the past.The specificity of these drawings lies in their ability to depict a particular moment, not a particular face. Working from direct observation, Cook records not just the literal facts of the person sitting in her studio but the experience of looking at them. She watches herself watching, leaving embedded in the page a map of her perception.The movement of her brush records the movement of her eye: looping, pausing, darting across the page and back again.It is worth noting that all the subjects of these drawings are friends and family. One can imagine the encounter: a conversation, music (usually Chet Baker) playing in the background, a moment in time that passes, and marks that endure.