Richard Cole

Home: Langley, British Columbia
Title: Grief
Media: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 152 x 152 cm
Website: colestudio.net

ARTIST STATEMENT

Last July, I lost my wife of 34 years to breast cancer. As I struggled through the complex stages of grief, I found comfort in two things: friendship and my practice. My therapy was to step away from my commercial practice as a landscape painter and return to my true passion, painting portraits. Here I painted the most honest paintings of my life. These paintings helped me significantly. ‘Grief’ is the last of the series. It is a painting of my friend Ayanna, my wife’s closest friend. Ayanna and I helped each other through this most difficult time. This portrait is of her.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Fort Langley-based artist Richard Cole was born in Edmonton and graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts. His work, collected in corporate and private collections worldwide, celebrates the textures of the ephemeral and unexpected beauty of land and water. It captures the vast spaces of Alberta’s prairie lands, the dark tangle of wildness that is BC’s Fraser River delta, and the ocean scapes of BC’s West Coast. In counterpoint to his sweeping vision, Richard’s work also honours small moments: bright poppies against dull grasses, the textures of bark, the promise of clouds, and the transient legacies of human settlement. Recently, Richard has returned to figurative work in oversized portraits of humans and wildlife and has illustrated two successful children’s books