Born in Kansas City, Missouri, artist William Hook first saw the Colorado Rockies as a child. His father, a professional photographer took the family every August to their mountain retreat, “Sky Hook,” situated at the foot of Longs Peak. The house was built in 1919 by his grandmother, an architect. While a young man, Hook began taking art classes at the prestigious Kansas City Art Institute. Early on, he decided to pursue a life in the arts, and was urged to do so by various members of his artistic family, including noted author, Willa Cather, who was his cousin. These early experiences set the stage for Hook’s future as a landscape painter.

In the 1960s Hook attended the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where the vast expanses of the surrounding landscape had a major impact on his life and his art. There, he was also exposed to abstraction, notably the work of Richard Diebenkorn who was an alumnus and professor there. As part of Hook’s studies, he went to Italy, enrolling in Perugia’s Università per Stranieri. He intended to spend a year there, but the Vietnam War forced him to return to New Mexico after four months.

After graduating from U.N.M. with a B.F.A., Hook studied at the respected Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California, an experience he considers to be the most important part of his training. There Hook learned graphics and illustration preparing for his career in advertising, a vocation he followed for many years. Hook moved to Denver, Colorado in 1975 where he lived for over twenty years. In 1987, he began to devote all his efforts to his fine art. Today, he works out of his studios in Carmel, California, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These specific locales are important to him because of his respect for the historic artists of the West including New Mexico painters, Victor Higgins and E. Martin Hennings, and California artists, Sam Hyde Harris and Edgar Payne.

To create his paintings, Hook uses his photos as references. He then employs vibrant shades of acrylic paint laid on the canvases with wide brushes. In spite of this, Hook’s paintings are not expressionistic, but are crisply realistic. His subjects vary ranging from close-up views, such as “White Iris,” to mid-range sights like “See-Through,” and to wide open vistas as seen in “Sage at Sundown.” One key interest for Hook that transcends his work is luminosity, with his pieces revealing his skill in conveying the look of light and shadow.

Though Hook is not an abstractionist, he does use many modernist techniques. His colors are often emphasized beyond their appearance in nature. Distant areas of scenery are intentionally made vague by applying layers of subtle color in order to achieve a two dimensional effect. And, although his bold brushwork reduces the elements of his compositions to a combination of painterly gestures, Hook’s results are not modernist, but are examples of his own signature realism.