Cook was a native of Springfield, Massachusetts. He studied at the Art Students League in New York with Joseph Pennell. He became a commercial artist and was hired to illustrate Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop. That inspired a trip to New Mexico, where he settled in the 1920s. He was an early member of the Taos art group.

This original woodblock shows the Tesuque Pueblo outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.