Picture gallery
There is something very calm and understated about Matthew Cook’s drawing, and it is unsurprising that the man’s manner matches his work. Both are deceptive, of course — behind every one of Cook’s images of the Iraq War was an artist who could at any moment have found himself in serious trouble. The might-haves are innumerable, but thinking of them is not Cook’s way — he works by focusing on what he has to do, which is, primarily, to draw.
It is a compulsion, he admits, and one that will be celebrated this week in an exhibition of the drawings he did for the The Times in 2003. The story of that trip has been told before — he drove into Iraq alone, guided by a map torn from this newspaper, and functioned like a reporter, filing a drawing every day via his satellite phone. He admits that his approach was naive — he often had no knowledge of what was happening around him and because he worried about the drawings he gave scant regard to personal safety — but he worked on professional instinct, drawing in two hours, the sweat pouring off his forehead as his deadline approached. He was invariably crumpled and flapping, he said on his return, but it never showed in his work.
The following year, newly married, he was called up to return to Iraq as a member of the Territorial Army, which he had joined in 1991 as a way of switching off from his work. This time he found himself escorting weapons inspectors and engineers as they moved around the country, and he often realised, with hindsight, that his convoy had been a minute ahead of a bomb blast, or a minute behind. “There’d be someone a hundred metres away with a phone waiting for a convoy. I was lucky enough not to be the one. So it was happening all the time and gunfire was all around. You’re driving along with a radio and an earpiece and you hear bursts of fire and you don’t know if they’re shooting at you or whether it’s going over your head.
“A lot of it’s unknown. You’re trying to anticipate all the time, thinking, if we get shot at and I’ve got 15 fuel tankers of helicopter aviation fuel, the rear vehicle’s going to stay with them and we’re going to scoot off to get help. The job focuses you, whether it’s military or the drawing.” A colleague lost an eye, another a buttock and, after the Daily Mirror’s publication of hoax pictures of British TA soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner, Cook encountered hostility. “It petered out after a week and then you got waves and smiles and occasionally kids throwing stones. You get the same in South London.”
If Cook plays down his experiences this is in deference to his wife, Aga, a jewellery designer, and to colleagues who he says faced infinitely more danger than he did. But Cook does admit that he has a taste for adventure, which by its nature involves risk, and that war fascinates him. “There might be a boyish curiosity. Like everyone in the TA crowd, I read my Victor comics when I was a kid and you always wonder what it’s like. It’s not very glamorous and it’s quite unpleasant. I’m much wiser now.
“But I wouldn’t have missed it. I couldn’t have sat at home knowing that the rest of my [TA] company had been mobilised. I don’t mean that in a brave way but if you’re submerged into it every day . . . it’s like the bombings here, doesn’t stop me jumping on a bus but it will stop American tourists.”
He did miss trees, beer and old English churches, he acknowledges, but what was “frustrating as hell” was not being able to stop to draw. “Everywhere you looked were amazing things. Outside Basra there were biblical scenes of mud-built houses. I was itching to go for a wander but I couldn’t.”
Given the chance he would have been at the front line when working for The Times, he says: “I’d have loved to be up there where the fighting was. Though often the enemy was over a kilometre away, you could only see with high optical sights so it wasn’t as everyone imagines and I don’t think the drawings would have worked because you can’t see much.
“I’d never drawn in the dust and the desert, the war on top was another difficulty. I couldn’t sit on safe stuff that I’d churned out, something you know you can do, there was no firm ground. I had no time to think.
“Foolishly, I wasn’t telling people where I was. I often didn’t know. I’d do it slightly differently now, I’d always tell my wife or the office, be a bit more thoughtful. I think I was lucky.” Is he saying that the urge to draw can make him selfish? “I think so, yes. I’d probably drop everything — social engagements — for drawing. It can take over, yes.” He has drawn since he was a toddler. His father, an art director with an advertising company, always sketched, and so father and son went off together, the son rapidly acquiring his father’s taste for dark material. “It would be some unglamorous derelict factory, or dockyards. Shanty towns, grotty sites, not pretty stuff. I’ve often wondered why but I don’t know whether I have any control over it.
“If I go past something I have to draw I see it instantly, my heart will speed up and I will try and do anything to turn the car round, get off the train. It’s just an urge to draw. I don’t know where it comes from. Probably a lot of it is from my father, similar interests. I’ve got to admit a lot of me subconciously is trying to please my father — if he could see me sketching, he’d be pleased. I’ve probably never told my Dad that.”
He laughs, a little embarrassed because analysis is not his way. “And it’s curiosity. I love telegraph poles. Even if it’s somewhere pretty and beautiful I’ll still come home with a sketch of a telegraph pole or some old lady. Drawing is emotional. You’ve got to draw what you want to draw. Part of it is a fear of doing twee drawings. I always want to see what’s inside. So Iraq was a dream job.”
It is a testament to Cook’s talent that he is now 41 and hasn’t stopped working since he left Kingston School of Art. He has drawn stamps for the Royal Mail, posters for Wimbledon, wine bottle labels for Sainsbury’s, and there is corporate work. His thirst for extreme subject matter persists, but mindful that he is a married man he has promised his wife that he will leave the TA.
Matthew Cook: The Times War Artist, is at Coningsby Gallery, 30 Tottenham Steet, London W1T 4RJ from today until October 29. The catalogue of the same title, in which Cook describes his experiences in Iraq — is available from The Times Books First for £9.99 (rrp £14.99) with free p&p: call 0870 160 8080 or log on to www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
