Seven of Christopher Cook’s graphites, created between 2001 and 2003, now hang in the Diboll gallery in the Monroe Library.

Appearing for the first time in the United States, the graphites, a type of painting, are on their third stop in a traveling show.

The works, entitled “Against the Grain,” will hang until Feb. 9, 2004.

Cook is in the faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Plymouth in Exeter, England.

His graphites represent recent changes in his work.

“The need for change had been gathering momentum . . . I was going through a difficult period in my work . . . a soul-searching period. India was an important catalyst in changing the work . . . You could say it was the source of the questioning, that the country allowed me to see why I was becoming dissatisfied.” Cook, the distinguished English painter and poet, said.

From a series of three visits to India, Cook returned to England questioning traditional western demands on art and lifestyle.

Cook describes his visits as an inevitable confrontation with the eastern world.

These visits extracted him from a changing art world and the pressure to succeed within it.

He saw a raw, unforgiving beauty in the proximity of extremes in India of the comely and the unsightly, poverty and wealth, and the chaste and perverse that affects his perception and recent work.

Cook said that India allowed him to experience moments of vision which had previously been only a ideal that eluded him.

This dislocation, a sort of dream state that aids Cook in his creating, became paramount in the graphites.

Cook began producing in 1997, after his return, at Acme studio in Portleven, Cornwall.

Cook found the Cornish stage ideal.

“The rawness of it appealed, the strong presence of the sea. It reduced my emotional temperature and allowed me to think clearly about how to go about work, how to absorb what I had been feeling and observing in India into a way of working,” Cook said.

In the Acme studio, Cook developed an unusual technique influenced by Indian mysticism and Surrealism.

The process has dominated his work ever since.

Experimenting with ideas gleaned from sand drawings he made in India, Cook created a unique liquid medium by mixing graphite powders, resin, white spirit, and linseed oil to use on non-porous, commercial lithographic printing paper.

The graphite medium forms a connection between process and content relating to Surrealist tradition of the artist making marks he is not in control of. Cook says the process often has more influence over subject matter than he, giving him clues about the evolution of images.

The monochromatic palette of Cook’s graphites relies on the density of the medium to establish tonal variation.

The grain, tonalities of monochromatic silver, and chiaroscuro of light relate Cook’s graphites to photography, particularly Daguerreotypes.

However, the surfaces of Cook’s graphites appear textured.

Subject matter and theme in “Against the Grain” draws from Cook’s 2001 residency at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

The Eden Project, a millennium funded project in the United Kingdom, similar to Arizona’s Biosphere, places domes made of hexagonal honeycomb-shape aluminum panels on the ruins of Chinese porcelain mines in Cornwall.

Geneticists, among other scientists, are invited to fill the domes with as many vegetable species as possible, including genetically enhanced, for the sake of posterity.

Cook found his interaction in Eden’s unique environment with scientists and other tradesmen inspirational.

The aluminum sheets he paints are the same material used to construct Eden’s domes.

Chain of Circumstance and Remote kiss, two works in Loyola’s show, are the first two of four works Cook made during his residency.

The liplike form, which Cook interprets as conveying the idea of gene-splicing, in the center frame of Remote Kiss exemplifies media-ascribing subject matter.

“It’s something very veig, something that’s about to become,” Cook said.

Eden brings up questions about genetic alteration and re-creationas it masquerades as paradise before the destruction of man.