The work of Robin Cole is woven through with silvery threads of meaning. Informed by a spiritual relationship to nature and the curiosity of a scientist, and filtered through the wide-eyed wonder of a child, her work contains volumes—including direct inspiration drawn from her love of literature and fascination with the cosmos.
The subject matter and the creative risks it entailed have resulted in Cole’s most personal body of work to date, and has opened up a feeling of vulnerability in the artist unique to this series.
Epithalamium II, oil on panel, 8 x 11"“Genesis is about the genesis of a soul and how it comes into the world, and my reflections on that as a new mother,” says Cole. “Everything else in the body of work are etudes about different parts of the process."
Epithalamium, the title of which means a poem written for a wedding, was inspired by an eponymous 1969 poem by Carl Adamshick. It features two boats bobbing in a luminous constellation of stars. Cole folded countless paper boats for the piece which resulted in “a highly embellished painting from life.”
Cole says, “This whole body of work is about bringing my son into the world from the magic of meeting another person and knowing that I wanted and was able to create another human with that person. And deciding to join your life with someone. Which is what these two paintings of the boats are about.”
Maiden, Mother, oil on mounted linen, 14¾ x 10½"
The glowing orb in Embryo has a similar aesthetic—a visual echo of astronomer Carl Sagan’s words, “we are made of star stuff.”
“I think about that a lot in terms of where we come from,” says Cole. “Nobody knows but you can sense the magic of that when you have a family. It was amazing to feel much like a passenger in a process that was very magical and ancient while also being so intimately personally acquainted with it. [In my paintings], stardust it is indicative of that emotion.”
Maiden, Mother is a portrait of a close friend who had recently decided to have a child. The light and shadow reflect the liminal space between the end of summer and beginning of fall, day and dusk, and the time “when you’ve made a decision to become something but are still in the process of becoming.”
Ode to Life depicts a dead bird surrounded by flowers against an abstracted background of bruisy tones. The bird flew into a house window around the same time she had a miscarriage the year prior. Cole had wanted to include that experience in the series but the form it should take hadn’t coalesced. “I found that beautiful bird on the steps and nature, as it always does, offered up a vehicle for that expression.”
Embryo I, oil on panel, 6 x 6"Ironically, Cole found creative liberation through advancing her technical skills. She found the confidence to incorporate figures into her repertoire, and to allow more imagination to intermingle with observation.
“I’ve never quite let my inner symbolist loose like I have with this particular set of paintings,” says Cole, adding that she once approached painting with an almost obsessive allegiance to accuracy. “My old work was like an analytic nonfiction essay where the work I wanted to create was more akin to poetry.
Ode to a Life, oil on mounted linen, 6 x 12"
“I just wanted it to be more soulful,” she continues. “I’ve never put something this vulnerable and personal out there. I feel really excited about it and a little nervous too—some of what I’m doing you’d be raked over the coals for in art school. But it’s really quite liberating to let that slightly more childlike part of myself have a little more free reign.”
Genesis will be featured in a solo show at Denver’s Gallery 1261 in March before continuing on to Arvada Center, in Arvada, Colorado, in April. —
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