Mads Cook
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Mads Cook is an artist based in Los Angeles, originally from Virginia. Her father is a surgeon who drew in his free time and taught her as a kid, taking her outside to find shapes in clouds. She spent seven years working as a model in New York, Brazil, Australia and London before getting her degree at UCLA and teaching English literature for several years. She went full time with art in 2025. She works in oil pastel and acrylic, painting figures that start out realistic and get pulled apart until only the feeling stays. She says modelling made her obsessed with bodies and what they look like when you stop seeing them as yours.
Q: You went full time with art last year. How did that come about?
A: Partly out of necessity, partly out of a desire to take a chance on myself. I’d been working in education, and when, due to a scarcity of funding, it was time for me to step away, I felt compelled to do something different. I’ve picked up various hobbies over the years, but I’ve never been able to stop drawing. I realized that in front of the canvas was where I felt most like myself, and I thought it was time to see if I could make it a life. So far, so good.
Q: Your father is a surgeon who draws in his free time and taught you as a kid. What stayed with you from that?
A: He taught me a lot about technique as a kid, but also about experimentation — and about how you can find art in the everyday. I think that influence is why I’m drawn to abstraction. I remember him taking me outside as a kid to look at clouds and draw what we saw in them; I remember him making little sculptures out of paperclips and giving them to my mother; I remember him telling me how surgery was like an art. He was always finding a way to create, and I try to emulate that now.
Q: You spent seven years modelling all over the world. How much of that experience ends up on the canvas?
A: Loads. That experience is to blame for my fixation on bodies and the desire to draw them abstractly. As a model, you are a kind of “art” (a confluence of artifice and beauty). There’s real dissonance in looking at your body all the time from that lens. It becomes less “you” and more like an idea of you. Like you are your own sculptor. It puts you in a liminal space that is both euphoric and frightening. I’m obsessively trying to capture that.
Q: Your figures are abstract, but clearly bodies. How do you decide how far to push the abstraction?
A: I’m looking for that tension specifically — the edge of the figure and the beginning of something else. For me, that has a lot to do with signifiers like faces, hands, feet — those places where we, as bodies, connect with everything else. When I’m working through a composition, I usually start from a point that is more realistic, and then I pull away and distort until the memory is what remains. There’s a dreamlike and metaphysical quality in that that I want to evoke. A toying with the body-mind connection. If we feel things in our minds and in our bodies, what parts of the body stay, and what do they do? And then, how do those pieces reflect the state of our minds? Then, I figure out how to push everything else to really lean into that feeling.
Q: You taught English literature for years. Does storytelling play a role in how you think about a painting?
A: Absolutely. Literature is a great love of mine, and the writing I admire most is writing that transports you without having to lay everything out for you. That creates, in rhythm and tone and prose, as much as in plot, a sense of being. I think about painting the same way, and I often do it while listening to literature I love as inspiration.
I want my work to feel like a transformative chapter or verse. To, while not being a literal painting of a woman in contemplation or a soft ocean breeze, be able to make the viewer experience those things.
Q: What's been the biggest surprise of this first year as a full-time artist?
A: I think mainly how much creativity begets creativity. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to take the risk and make it work, but I am also more surprised at myself and the way that my work is shifting and evolving with so much time and attention, only a few months in. It’s exciting, as much as it is sometimes scary, but the ability to explore and challenge myself has been a real joy.
