There are things that inform the works, but that doesn't go anywhere near what you're actually looking at.

- Nigel Cooke

The paintings don't exist outside themselves. There's no lead photograph off the internet or anything like that. It all comes from my mind and it's a…

- Nigel Cooke

Using painting as a metaphor for consciousness is what I'm interested in.

- Nigel Cooke

Small thoughts grow into a picture. It may suggest an individual or it may suggest a place, but generally the painting's job is to work that [idea] i…

- Nigel Cooke

I'm a quiet person, I'm not a flashy art world person. I'm in the studio in the middle of nowhere. There's sheep and fields. The work has to be authe…

- Nigel Cooke

The paintings are kind of set in the past, present, and future all at once.

- Nigel Cooke

There are certain times when a painting accelerates beyond you, and you have to try and understand and catch up with it.

- Nigel Cooke

The moment is never perfect. It's like that right now - in my head I'm being super lucid, but you never are. You're always fumbling.

- Nigel Cooke

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be…

- Nigel Cooke