Guy Cobb

Guy Franke Cobb (born October 27, 1963) is an American artist born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States.

Career
In 1983 Cobb left the University of Mississippi to join his older brother, Ty Cobb, as a co-founder of an acrobatic basketball show called the Bud Light Daredevils. The group entertained audiences at NBA and college basketball games in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. By 1990 Cobb had relocated to rural Fair Grove, Missouri where he was inspired by a documentary of Jackson Pollock and began working with sheet metal and locust tree thorns. His first painting titled, Down in the Valley of Rural Violence was an examination of the 1987 James Schnick massacre at Elkland, Missouri.

In 1993 Cobb moved to Memphis and began painting again. His work was first exhibited in the lobby of the Memphis Commercial Appeal's newspaper office. Cobb donated paintings to raise funds for WKNO Public Television and the Memphis Orpheum Theater and other works to hospitals and mental institutions. Cobb has donated more than 60 paintings to not-for-profit organizations and museums throughout the region. In 2003 Cobb was invited to Nashville to view his paintings on permanent display at the Tennessee State Capitol building and the Tennessee State Museum.



In 2004 Cobb began experimenting with "visual color blending" in his paintings and he created a series of paintings for the sight impaired and the blind. Cobb incorporated thick textures onto the surface of his paintings by squeezing the paints onto the canvas. By 2005 he had completed a series of "Braille paintings" designed to be touched and interpreted by the blind. One of these paintings was used as a subject for the University of Missouri's Museum of Art & Archeology's 2009 Art In Bloom event.

Reception
Art critics John Simmons and Camille Howell wrote: "Down in the Valley of Rural Violence is typical of what Cobb calls his 'thorn paintings'.....His use of tortured metal, abstract forms and an overlay of projecting thorns all combine in this and the other paintings in the series to produce statements of anger and frustration". "Guy Cobb is an artist worth watching. He could well become a real force on the regional art scene." "Cobb's works are unsettling, disquieting, and impossible to ignore."