The world — and her home — is her canvas

One evening, years ago, when Thelma Cook was still working as a club manager and bartender at the Holiday Park Motel in Chanute, a man from Georgia walked into the club, eyed the oil paintings on the wall and decided to purchase the lot. He had to settle up with Cook first; she was the artist.
Sales on this order don’t happen most years, but in the three decades since the talented hobbyist learned to paint, she’s sold a few pieces here and there. Mostly, though, she gives them away.
Aside from a handful of lessons held in the basement of her ex-mother-in-law’s home in Le Roy 30 years ago, Cook is self-taught. She doesn’t dismiss the importance of those ad hoc classes, though; they exposed in Cook a talent which otherwise might have remained untapped.
A life in the fine arts wasn’t an automatic next step for a girl from the hollers of southwest Missouri. “I grew up different from kids nowadays. We didn’t have a TV until I was seven. I grew up back in the back. I had a .410 shotgun since I was 12, and a dog. I was a dead shot. And we had a fishing pole. That was it.”
That would have been a great way to grow up.
“Oh, no it wouldn’t have been,” Cook corrects. “It was boring as hell. You go to bed with the chickens and get up with the … Now, here,” she says, changing the subject, “my friend liked hummingbirds, so I painted this for her and sent it to her for Christmas.”
That’s beautiful. Did you paint or draw as a little girl?
“What? God, no,” Cook says with an emphasis that points up the naiveté of the question. “I never even had art in school, because we didn’t have art. Now, look at this. I did this on glass for a lady.” Cook points to a photograph in a scrapbook showing a perfectly rendered lighthouse painted onto the face of a detached window pane.
There is a cabinet in the 63-year-old’s home where she keeps a tall pile of scrapbooks — photographic evidence of her past work, each picture a testament to her range.
“See, I paint on everything,” says Cook — rocks, mailboxes, water tanks, milk cans. “Look here,” she says, running a finger down a page of photos, “gourds, gourds, gourds, gourds. I poke a hole in them, dry them up, paint them, and now you’ve got birdhouses hanging in the trees.”

COOK is an unpretentious artist. She marks little distinction between the delicate brushwork she commits to a canvas and the coats of paint she periodically slaps on her house and garage. The act is her passion. “I painted this house here and the biggest brush I used was four inches,” boasts Cook.
And yet, like any painter, Cook has definite ideas about the visual world she wants to inhabit. “I have a very weird, weird color combination. I’m not dull. I’m not a brown person; I don’t like brown very much. I like color. OK, I can do brown to a certain point.”
When the Cooks moved to Iola four years ago, Thelma tracked down the same foam green house paint she’d used on the exterior of her previous home in rural Chanute. “It’s actually called Permanent Mint. And my car” — the grandmother of several has a bright yellow Mustang in the driveway — “is actually called Screaming Yellow. It’s my retirement car.”
Whatever compelled our cave ancestors to daub the walls at Lascaux is alive and well in Cook. She’s applied her brush to nearly every room on the inside of her Walnut Street home, too. A brief tour of the artist’s snug one-story includes: a brightly-decorated living room crowded with angel figurines (“I’m into angels,” Cook says, naming what may be an infectious habit — her daughter eventually got into fairies and, later, her husband, gnomes); a pink and white striped hallway; a Native American-themed master bedroom (“My husband is Cherokee.”), the walls of which bear a special design she created using a brush made from a feather duster. There is in this room, too, a perfect still-life portraying an arrangement of Indian pots, which Cook painted for her husband, and, on the opposite wall, a tintype wedding photograph of the couple taken at the chapel at Silver Dollar City, showing a smiling, heavily pregnant bride.
“And this is the room everybody thinks is nuts,” says Cook, opening the door onto her now-grown daughter’s room, whose rainbow-colored, fairy-centric decoration Cook has preserved in the years since her youngest flew the coop.

BUT IT is Cook’s latest project which has drawn the attention of her neighbors. Tired of looking at two planks of “ugly” plywood, Cook has added to the meager ecology of public art in Iola by transforming her garage door into a landscape mural.
Drawing inspiration from calendar pages, library books, as well as elements in her own backyard, Cook, using “regular old outside house paint,” has created a summer idyll formed by a background of vaulting mountains and a placid lake; and, in the foreground, a fountain, gazebo, and a patio table set for two with a bottle of “sparkling champagne.”
Until October, Cook had been working the night shift at Russell Stover for the past 11 years, during which, she says, “The painting all stopped.” Retired now, and still obviously in possession of her huge talents, Cook has more time than ever to devote to her art — a label the down-to-earth painter is still not entirely at home with.
“I see some of these artists’ paintings on television that sell for $1,500, and you’re going” — Cook cranks her head to the side — “you’re going, ‘What the hell is that?’
“All I know,” Cook says, waving an unlit cigarette in the air, “I ain’t no Gary Hawk. But I guess everybody has their own thing.”