Robin Cole, born in Denver, Colorado in 1985, received her BA in English at Colorado College on a prestigious scholarship from the Boettcher Foundation. She later completed the post-baccalaureate program in Studio Art at the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland, and went on to earn a Masters of Fine Art degree from the Laguna College of Art and Design (LCAD) in 2013.
Robin has been an artist in residence at the Burren College of Art, the Watershed Research Station (a division of the Science Museum of Minnesota), the Eastern Frontier Educational Foundation, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, Spiro Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has spent time as guest lecturer with Colorado College, and taught for five years at her other alma mater, LCAD, where she was able to utilize both her literary and artistic backgrounds to teach a variety of undergraduate drawing and graduate writing courses. In spring of 2018, Robin returned to Colorado Springs, where she now lives and works. She recently received a second artist grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (CAD $18,000) in support of her current paintings, as a followup to her initial grant in 2012 for her unique encaustic work.
Robin is represented by Gallery 1261 in Denver, CO and also shows with Lora Schleshinger Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
Statement
My work explores an inner wilderness by way of an outer one; I believe that the natural world is not only an inherent part of us as human beings (and we of it), but that it is the original, exquisitely sensitive mirror in which we find our own inner terrain and wildness reflected. My work has always been an act of reverence for the natural world. There is an element of science in it, in the desire to study and observe. But there is an element of spirit, too, in the continual reaching for something just beyond the visible.
Though the devoted naturalist in me is always present, these images come as often from within as without, informed as significantly by emotional texture as observation. I am interested in moments of elemental experience that feel resonant in this way, in the way of dreams. Sometimes the forces of our world seem to align, and the concentric motion of insects, the unique geometry of the land, or the slow-waning glow of green things at dusk lends a feeling of otherworldliness to something previously familiar. These are the times when the veil feels thin, when an omnipresent but unnoticed magic moves beneath the surface of the ordinary. We are finely tuned to these existential currents. In my work, I aim to cultivate a receptivity to them, to pair our desire for understanding with an equally honest experience of imagination.
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