Matching Set is a collaborative exhibition featuring mother/daughter duo Charlotte Cook-Fuller and Lynette Cook. Lynette Cook is a Bay Area realist painter working in acrylic on canvas and her mother, Charlotte Cook-Fuller, lives in Baltimore, MD and is a mixed media textile artist.

 

Working from personal photographs of favorite places in San Francisco they each create a piece in their respective mediums. The work is presented side-by-side giving the viewer two different interpretations of the same image. Lynette’s precisely painted scenes, in her signature realist style, eloquently capture light and shadow. While Charlotte meticulously stitches the same scene using fabric and thread, the hand ever-present as lines ungulate and waver into focus.

 

Lynette credits her mother as an early champion of her art career and would accompany her on many photo expeditions to find reference material for her realist artwork. Growing up Charlotte’s creative outlet found itself in the many clothes she made for the family, refinishing furniture, and sewing bedspreads, curtains, and tablecloths.

 

“This collection is an expression of the varying choices available to and made by women of different generations. The creative streak that my mother and I share was also apparent in the paintings by my great grandmother, Adeline Larkin Regan, created in the late 1800s. Her emerging talent was cut short: Adeline's new husband didn't want her to paint once they were married, and so she gave it up.”

 

Their collaborative project acknowledges the invisible handiwork of (mostly) women, and the thousands of hours of labor over a lifetime that is seldom seen or appreciated outside the confines of the home.  Lynette and Charlotte have been developing this series for the past 11 years, highlighting the generational differences through the work of their own family, starting with the great grandmother down to Lynette and Charlotte’s on “Matching Set”.