Biography
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Lynette Cook Photo: Ben Yount
After growing up in Illinois, Cook attended Mississippi University for Women, receiving a BS in biology and a BFA in drawing and painting. After graduating from the California College of the Arts with an MFA (drawing, with a specialization in scientific illustration), she became the staff Artist/Photographer for the Morrison Planetarium, California Academy of Sciences, a position she held for sixteen years.
Via freelance work and subsequent self-employment Cook worked with researchers at the forefront of scientific discoveries; most notably, discoverers of planets outside our solar system. This resulted in worldwide publication of Cook’s astronomical images in books, periodicals, documentaries, and press releases by Astronomy, BBC Television, CNN, The Discovery Channel, Japan Public Television, NASA, Newsweek, Scientific American, Time, and US News & World Report (a partial list). Cook also has been featured on ABC7 News (KGO) and in USA Today.
In 2010 Cook shifted direction toward painting, her first love. Much of her work focuses on the urban environment of the San Francisco Bay Area, from historical landmarks to more common "everyday" scenes. Cook's Shadows & Silhouettes series features the patterns of light and shadow created by exterior fire escapes, including scenes of laundry hanging out to dry in the Chinatown breezes. This series is represented by the Andra Norris Gallery and Christopher-Clark Fine Art.
Cook is a 2016 grant recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Other career highlights include solo exhibitions at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, CA and at the Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame, CA (2020). A frequent award winner, Cook won the Grand Prize in "Lifting the Sky," the 2021 national exhibition of American Women Artists, which came with a $10,000 cash prize. In 2025, she received the American Art Collector Award for Excellence at the 19th Annual International Juried Exhibition of the International Guild of Realism, Sugarman-Peterson Gallery, Santa Fe, NM and the Best Acrylic award in PleinAir Magazine's 14th Annual PleinAir Salon Competition. This coming July (2026), Cook's painting Illumination, which received First Place in the Landscape category of the 17th International ARC Salon Competition, will be exhibited at Sotheby's New York in the combined exhibition of the 17th and 18th International ARC Salon Competitions.
The artist is a Signature member of both American Women Artists and the National Oil and Acrylic Painters' Society, a member of the International Guild of Realism, and a Fellow of the International Association of Astronomical Artists.
The textiles created by Charlotte Cook-Fuller, the artist's mother, are part of the Mother & Daughter Series. Originally, these were created as a collaboration: paired paintings and textiles of favorite San Francisco locations. Their first joint exhibit, Point, Counterpoint: San Francisco Through the Eyes of Charlotte Cook-Fuller and Lynette Cook, was held at Evergreen Museum & Library in Baltimore, MD in 2015. Other two-person exhibitions have followed, with the last presented at the Colibri Gallery in Morgan Hill, CA from August—September 2024.
Go to http://extrasolar.spaceart.org/space.html to see Cook's astronomical illustrations.
For a selection of Cook's astronomical paintings available for sale, click here.