Lynette Cook

 Lynette Cook                                                              Photo: Ben Yount

After growing up in Illinois, Cook attended Mississippi University for Women, receiving a BS­ in biology and a BFA in drawing and painting. Within months of graduating from the California College of the Arts with an MFA (drawing, with a specialization in scientific illustration), she became the staff Artist/Photographer for the Morrison Planetarium, California Academy of Sciences, a position she held for sixteen years.

Via freelance work and subsequent self-employment Cook worked with researchers at the forefront of scientific discoveries; most notably, discoverers of planets outside our solar system. This resulted in worldwide publication of Cook’s astronomical images in books, periodicals, documentaries, and press releases by Astronomy, BBC Television, CNN, The Discovery Channel, Japan Public Television, NASA, Newsweek, Scientific American, Time, and US News & World Report (a partial list). Cook also has been featured on ABC7 News (KGO) and in USA Today.

In 2010 Cook shifted direction toward painting, her first love. She now focuses on the urban environment of the San Francisco Bay Area, from historical landmarks to more common "everyday" scenes. She is a 2016 grant recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Cook's Shadows & Silhouettes series features the patterns of light and shadow created by exterior fire escapes, some of which include laundry hanging out to dry in the urban breezes. These pieces are represented by the Andra Norris Gallery and Christopher-Clark Fine Art. Career highlights include solo exhibitions at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, CA and at the Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame, CA (2020). Cook won the Grand Prize in "Lifting the Sky," the 2021 national exhibition of American Women Artists, which came with a $10,000 cash award. 2022 brought Cook the Best in Show in the Acrylic International Biennial Juried Exhibition at the Kenosha Public Museum in Kenosha, WI. The de Young Museum in San Francisco selected Cook's work for its "de Young Open" exhibit both in 2020 and 2023. More recently, Cook won "Best Realism" for her painting Ollie's Choice in the NOAPS Best of America Small Works Exhibition 2024 (National Oil and Acrylic Painters' Society) in Santa Fe, NM.

The textiles created by Charlotte Cook-Fuller, the artist's mother, are part of the Mother & Daughter Series. Originally, these were created as a collaboration: paired paintings and textiles of favorite San Francisco locations. Their first joint exhibit, Point, Counterpoint: San Francisco Through the Eyes of Charlotte Cook-Fuller and Lynette Cook, was held at Evergreen Museum & Library in Baltimore, MD in 2015. Other two-person exhibitions have followed, with the most recent presented at the Colibri Gallery in Morgan Hill, CA from August—September 2024.

Go to http://extrasolar.spaceart.org/space.html to see Cook's astronomical illustrations.
For a selection of Cook's astronomical paintings available for sale, click here.