John Cole

Recognized as one of the Pacific Northwest’s pre-eminent landscape painters, John D. Cole (1937-2007) was a British-born American painter who made his home in Bellingham, Washington for over 30 years. Favoring abstraction over literal description, Cole’s distinctive, muscular style, which evolved out of his European background and American modernist influences, sublimely expresses the key features of the majestic Northwest landscape— water, mountains, and trees.

The artist's approach to painting nurtures a captivating tension between abstraction and representation. Broadly applied opaque color, simplified shapes suggesting massive forms, and superbly constructed compositions are the hallmarks of Cole’s style. While marked European influences from German Expressionists, Cubists, Fauves are present in Cole’s paintings, it was the reverent representations of nature by the Canadian Group of Seven that drew him to make his home in Washington, within easy driving distance of British Columbia and Oregon. The artist also painted on Long Island (NY) as a youth, and in Southern California, New Mexico and Florida.

According to his master log book, Cole painted more than a thousand oils, pastels, and acrylic paintings. He also made studies with pen, ink, and charcoal outdoors, many of which were the basis for larger studio works. During the 1980s, he began printmaking, building his own hydraulic press to make black and white relief prints from wood and linoleum blocks.

Though his landscapes have been exhibited most frequently, figure painting and still life were also important genres in Cole’s total oeuvre. These works, a number of which are still in the Estate, clearly mirror Cole’s stylistic development and in fact may have propelled that development. He considered his Genesis series his most significant. There he merges the iconic Northwest elements of waterfalls and trees with the human figure. Dating from the mid 1990s, he revisited the theme 10 years later, just before he passed away.

Harris Harvey Gallery, formerly the Lisa Harris Gallery, has represented John Cole’s work since the late 1980s. His works have been included in exhibitions at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Frye and Tacoma Art Museums in Washington and at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington mounted a major exhibition of the artist’s work, John Cole: A Historical Perspective, in 2014. Cole was the subject of a 30-year retrospective in 2003 at the Whatcom Museum, which was accompanied by the catalog, John Cole: The Enduring Northwest Landscape (distributed by University of Washington Press). The artist’s work is featured in The Pacific Northwest: a Painted History (Sasquatch Books, Seattle), and 100 Artists of the West Coast (Schiffler Publishing), and Cubist Thinking (Lisa Harris Gallery). His paintings are in numerous private collections throughout the United States and Canada, as well as the Whatcom Museum of History and Art and the Museum of Northwest Art.