James Cook

James Cook is an artist who makes intricate drawings entirely with typewriters, building each image keystroke by keystroke from thousands of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. He lives in Braintree, Essex, where he has a home studio, and has a second studio in East London at Trinity Buoy Wharf.

He discovered typewriter art through a college project on artists working with technology, and has pursued it since 2014. He went on to study architecture in London to master's level and worked in architecture practices before turning to typewriter art full time, choosing, as he put it, to draw buildings rather than design them. In over a decade he has made more than 350 artworks on a collection of more than 100 vintage typewriters, many of them donated by admirers of his work.

His subjects include city scenes and landmarks, from London to New York and Tokyo, and portraits, among them Authors in Type, a series of fifty typed portraits of celebrated writers. A single piece can take from a week to three months, and many contain hidden typed messages. The work ranges from postcard size to large compositions assembled in sections, and he often travels with a typewriter to make work on location.