How James Cook Uses a Typewriter to Push Boundaries and Create the Spectacular
It was 10 years ago when James Cook realized he could piece together the keys of a typewriter to “type” something truly magical. Images c/o Cook.
James Cook isn’t an artist in the typical sense. Instead of using oil paints, brushes, and pencils to make his work, he uses a much more unconventional, even antiquated tool: the typewriter.
Turns out, it is perfect for turning language into visual art.
Now in his 10th year as a “typewriter artist” (for lack of a better term), Cook has carved out a career path uniquely his own. As far as we know, no one else sells this kind of artwork.
From his home base in London, he has “typed” everything from a picture of London’s Royal Albert Hall to its Battersea Power Station. Right now, he’s working on a longer-term project — 50 portraits of famous authors through history for his upcoming book. His aspiration is to visit New York City and create drawings on-site of some of the most famous landmarks in the world, including the Empire State Building. After all, being on location and having hundreds of people watch him at work is at least half of the spectacle. (Often, people have no idea what he is really doing.)
Here, Cook shares how he creates these pieces of art, including the things he sees when he looks at a keyboard; what he learned from designing buildings that he applies to drawing them; and the ways a piano influenced how his brain works.
As a child, Cook would draw buildings from memory at night as a way to take in the architecture he saw that day. Now, he captures landscapes on-site, with a typewriter on his lap.
How did you get into making typewriter art?
Typewriter art started as a school project for a college art class. Our teacher had us look into artists that have used technology in interesting ways throughout history. I found David Hockney’s early work with fax machines, and went down that avenue. But I didn’t find a fax machine — I found something better.
I chanced upon Paul Smith, an American-based artist born at the turn of the 20th century who made artwork with typewriters. He was born with cerebral palsy, and because of his muscle condition, he couldn’t hold a pencil or a pen to learn to read and write. At a very early age, his parents gave him a typewriter, hoping that it could give him that mechanical control which would make it easier for him to write. Instead, he started making drawings with typewriters. He found ways to piece together letters, numbers, and punctuation marks to create something that doesn’t look like it’s made from a language — at least from a distance. It looks like an ink pen drawing. So I studied his portfolio when I started my typewriter art.
Where and when did this start to take shape as a career?
Ever since I was a child, before I even knew what it meant to be an architect, I wanted to draw and design buildings. Flash forward to 2015, and I moved to London as a student to study architecture. But the cost of living was high, and I needed to find a way to pay the bills. So I decided to commission my typewriter art by doing portraits for families as a side job. Once I got my masters degree, I worked in different architecture offices around London. Then the pandemic hit and I had to move back home. By this point, I had built a bigger following on Instagram by sharing my artwork. I enjoyed drawing, and I also realized I didn’t want to design buildings — I wanted to draw buildings. So I changed career paths. I knew I could keep doing it as long as people wanted artwork from me.
Can you give an example of those early projects?
I started doing panoramic drawings of the London skyline. Then when it became possible to leave the house during Covid, I asked different London venues if I could draw their buildings. Most were happy to have me come along after that period of hibernation. The city was quiet, and it gave me an opportunity to make my drawings in cool places.
It takes him about six hours a day, seven days a week to transform letters, punctuation marks, and numbers into a bespoke drawing, the likes of which nothing can truly compare to.
When most people look at a keyboard, they just see keys and letters. What do you see?
I don’t have a desk with oil paints and brushes scattered all over the place — that’s a bit too free for me. There are just 42 keys and it’s all about how to piece the puzzle together. I start with letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, and by the end, I’ve created something bigger.
For shading things, I use the @ symbol because it has a large surface area to it. Or, if I’m typing the pupils of someone’s eyes, I’ll use the parentheses to get the curve because the bracket symbols are almost the perfect scale for typing somebody’s eyes on a 8.5 x 11” piece of paper, which is sort of a blessing for someone who’s trying to work within these constraints.
But a lot of typewriters pre-date the backslash or the @ symbol, so I’m always trying to find new ways of using the keys on those older typewriters. I recently discovered that using a capital “I” overlapped with a “0” makes a good torso and legs, and the lowercase “o” makes a good head for the top. Whereas previously, I would have made them from commas and full stops and bracket symbols. Other times, it’s as easy as using one letter like a capital “E” to make a window.
There are millions of combinations, and everything that is possible is self-contained in this small box. At the same time, a typewriter comes with its own constraints.
Cook learned to type faces from typing faces in real-time, as a student in London trying to pay the bills. Today, he’s typed portraits for Tom Hanks, Kelly Clarkson, Dr. Who cast members, and the like — each of whom are as into it as we are.
You spend five or six hours a day typing. What do you think about while you do it?
I’ve always found making typewriter art to be therapeutic. It’s bizarre, in a way, because typewriters are loud and make clunky mechanical noises. I normally wear headphones and listen to a podcast when I’m working, but the actual process of typing onto the page is entrancing. I become absorbed in it. And it’s not just me. We’ve done exhibitions in the past where people can have a go at it themselves. We set up this table with five different typewriters and some references for people to use, and it’s amazing how quickly people switch off from being excited and chatty to focused. The room quickly becomes silent as everyone gets into the zone.
Can it feel lonely to create art that almost no one else makes?
There are about five people in the world that like to use typewriters to make art as a hobby. We all discuss our work in a Facebook group. Even though there are no set guidelines or rules as to how to make this work, we’ve all somehow approached it and learned to do it in the same way.
Sometimes, the real spectacle is onlookers trying to figure out what exactly Cook is making out in the public with a typewriter on his lap. In that way, it’s never lonely.
Tell us something no one knows about your work.
Sometimes I like to incorporate hidden messages into it. For example, if it’s a London subject, I’ll remember things from my days in university, like certain pubs I would go to with my friends on the street that I’m drawing, and then I’ll hide my friends’ names in the piece. Sometimes I do personal references that no one will understand. They will look at the piece and be like, Who’s Sarah? But nobody needs to know. It’s just the stuff I think about when I type.
I try to keep things non-political, but I once made a replica of American Gothic, and I finished it the day that Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned. As a way to signify that day, I wrote her name. But it’s very well-hidden. Nobody would notice it unless I pointed it out.
It’s the little details…
…that add up to something really great.
What led you to pursue art in the first place?
I was born in Essex, and I lived in the same town, Braintree, until the age of 18. Just this tiny little town that most people haven't heard of. All the schools I went to were in a row on the same street, so I never left that street for the first 18 years of my life, basically. Whenever my family and I would go into the city for day trips, it was always so exciting. I remember flipping through the pages of these books featuring massive historic buildings and to see them in person was fascinating. I would just come back home and draw from memory the buildings I had seen that day.
Then, when my mum went to hospital to give birth to my younger twin siblings, I spent a long time with my grandmother during that time because my dad was unwell. And my grandmother said, Oh, don’t worry, James. She had a plan for me. There’s this incredible landmark stadium building in the London skyline called the Millennium Dome, and we built a card model of it together. I was always making things like that throughout my childhood, and I feel like all of these things really add up and connect, because now that building is literally across the river from me.
Do you pursue anything else creative?
I also play the piano, but I’m not very good at reading music. In fact, I’m really bad at it. And the way that I’ve learned is by ear and muscle memory. Typewriters are similar. You develop muscle memory from learning the weight of the keys. While I have about 100 typewriters, there are only two that I use all the time to do all the projects, just because I’m so familiar with how those two machines feel. It’s as if they are musical instruments.
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