P J Crook MBE

Although PJ Crook exhibits internationally, she lives and works in Gloucestershire, away from the urban life she often paints. An autobiographical thread runs, like a pictorial journal through the wide diversity of her subject matter, encompassing memories of her own childhood (as with Radio Pram) underlined by stories her parents told her of theirs and observation of her own two children as they made their passage from infancy to adulthood.

During 2004/5, she travelled in Japan and Saudi Arabia looking at the cultures and gathering inspiration for a series of large painting, commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of an international company based in the latter. She is also working, in collaboration with the musician Robert Fripp, on Paradise, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, a travelling exhibition/installation which will open at Gloucester City Art Gallery and Museum in 2006 and culminate at her London dealers, Robert Sandelson in Cork Street, later the same year. There will be two other museum shows in 2006 – A Day at the Races in Cheltenham and a retrospective exhibition at the Morohashi Museum of Modern Art in Japan.