ARTIST Q & A: FROM MEMORY TO NATURE

by Big Hug Studio

Darlene Cole is a phenomenal Canadian artist whose work can now be seen at Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto. She is already an established artist and I am pleased to display her work and interview on my blog.  As Ms. Cole says it best herself, she paints from the heart and it shows throughout her work. When you take a closer look you can see that her artwork evokes images of childhood, relationships, and nature all at once. She instills her work with an innocence that is mystical and pure. Memory is also at the center of her work and Ms. Cole always reminds us that time has an elusive quality. 

Her paintings capture the essence of the natural world together with animal and human aspects. Whether she's painting a leopard, a deer or a swan she renders them in a dreamlike setting with a playful water colour effect. Her painterly style transitions to her other works as she aims to capture an ethereal balance between what we see and what we want to remember. Her images of childhood makes us wonder of a time long gone and her vivid portrayals of florals show us that beauty is forever entwined with a quiet sensualness. 

Ms. Cole doesn't shy away from using colour and light to give us a therapeutic impact. Her paintings are easy on the eyes and their sometimes blurry rendering gives us something to relive and wonder. She paints the Canadian landscape with ingenuity and we see references to Canadiana throughout. She pays homage to her home and we honour her work and support her as the great Canadian artist she is. 

Female artists are becoming better recognized and she is no exception. It will come as no surprise that her paintings sell remarkably well and she has much to look forward to. Her current exhibition entitled Paradise is currently on display until December 23rd at Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto. I have included a few artworks here from Artsy to show both the breadth of her work as well as her international reach. Please enjoy these together with the interview. 

Paradise
(resilience)
2024

Tell us about your upbringing and education in Canada?

I went to a very small elementary school in a farming town, then for high school we were bussed to a more populated area. I went to Queen’s University for my Bachelor of Fine Art and from there I was one of the first four students to complete a Masters of Fine Art at the University of Waterloo.

How did your environment impact your work?

My parents had a passion for restoring historic homes. They sold a cottage and a new build house to purchase and restore a Victorian home in Brooklin, Ontario where I have the most childhood memories with my sister and brother. There’s nothing like the way thought-out architecture makes me feel. It’s a language, just like painting is. Living in Kingston, I also lived in historic houses and loved how the downtown wrapped around Lake Ontario. Everything was close by so I could walk and I realized how much one takes in visually during a walk…this really influenced the immersive aspect of my work with the figure enveloped in nature.

You paint dream-like scenes in your art tell us how they come about?

I’m influenced by music and the motion of the two lakes that I live between. I have two studios, one is just a few steps from the lake. The drive between the two studios is mostly farmland with dreamy skies and meandering pathways. The lake is cinematic to me…I can sit or canoe and ideas continuously roll for paintings.

How does colour figure in your art?

I paint under natural light only. The weather, the music I’m listening to and what’s going on in my life and the world all contribute to my colour palette.

Paradise
(peonies of the sea)

How has your style of painting evolved over the years?

I don’t believe in style when it comes to painting. Overtime I feel that human experience and the physical presence of touch through the brushstrokes evolves and my hope is that the drawing element of my work shows through as a foundation.

What do you wish for your audience to know about your work?

It comes from the heart. Ultimately, it’s the honesty and conversations that I hope to spark with my work — between the paintings themselves and with the viewer through the mystery of the figure and the layers of nature.

What is your work process like, tell us your day to day?

I paint in spurts of time. I used to work for 8 hours straight and I found that in the last hour I would paint over the last 7 hours. It took me years to figure out that painting for me is very intense emotional blocks of time with spaces in between. I always want to try new things, so I don’t really see it as the same process every time I’m painting.

What inspires you the most as an artist?

Wow…so many thoughts…the human body, relationships, gardens that have a wildness about them, wild animals, original recordings of music, live music, colour combinations that I would never have thought of, patterns and textures in textiles, the grain in old oak furniture, heirloom peonies, how the light changes in our four seasons.

What’s next for you as an artist?

I would like to do a large installation sculpture.

Who are some of your favourite film directors? 

Luca Guadagnino…I’m drawn in by the sensualness of his films.

What do you like to do on your day off? 

Visit museums, forest walks, visit the lake, go for a chai latte.

How has the Canadian art scene changed over the years?

The biggest and most wonderful change is that there are more women artists being recognized and there’s more diversity of Art in Canada.

www.bighugstudio.com

DARLENE COLE - LOVE NOTES DECEMBER 4 - 18, 2021

by Robert Steven - Portrait Gallery of Canada

Love Notes, the current exhibition of paintings by Darlene Cole on view at Bau-Xi Gallery until December 18, is masterful and mysterious, disarming and disorienting, and most of all it is both promising and poignant. Works that might seem simple from afar, or in photographs, upon close inspection dazzle the mind as technical achievements and overwhelm the spirit with suggested narratives of hope and beauty and love that nevertheless evoke the full spectrum of our emotions.

The apparent spontaneity and intensity of the application of the paint, which is attested to by rogue spatters of colour, rivulets of solvent flowing through thin paint, and the decisive, unwavering movement of the brush along its seemingly intuitive path is bewildering when it is considered in the light of the exquisite control of the clarity, colour, and consistency of the paint throughout the exhibition.

Disorienting is an insufficient word to describe the effect of this paradox on the viewer, the technique of these works is positively koanic. No matter where the eye searches, there is no colour but the colour, no mark other than the mark, no sign anywhere of any revision or hesitation. There are layers of paint, to be sure, but there is astonishingly little layering. The deep rich void behind a still life of peonies turns out to be a free floating field of a perfectly precise colour that somehow visually evokes the whole history of studio still life painting in the most strikingly efficient manner imaginable, paradoxically by using a direct lyrical abstract movement that echoes Frankenthaler as much as anything else.

The marks we might call the top layer, though many of these also stand freely alla prima, although full bodied and solid are still applied with a light, shimmering touch, the brushwork is overt and explicit and shows every sign of being rapid and intuitive, which makes the extraordinary precision and control of every stroke, each so precise in its colour and its consistency, all the more striking. The tension encoded in the work between the active and the contemplative painter is thrilling and suggests to me the mastery of both skill and spirit in Chinese ink brush calligraphy.

That Cole demonstrates such complete and subtle mastery of her medium and her technique is no surprise, 2021 is after all her twenty-second year with Bau-Xi Gallery, yet the effect and impact on the viewer of contemplating the seemingly impossible dynamics of the paint handling does not wane with extended looking, nor is the wonder at the artist’s ability diminished by any possible explanation of how it may have been developed and refined over time.

Despite the longstanding presence and appreciation of Cole’s work in Toronto, the artist herself remains enigmatic. Generally avoiding studio visits, she sends her work largely unaccompanied into the world to meet its viewer and allows the dialogue between them to proceed without further intervention or interpretation on her part. While this almost certainly creates the conditions for a special kind of non-verbal self-directed bonding between the viewer and the object, it demonstrates a degree of restraint, consistency, and commitment to her ideals that few creators could sustain, especially over so many years.

It is within this context that we turn to the final mystery of the works: the subjects depicted, the narratives represented, and the deeply felt though elusive and dynamic moods they evoke. The paintings are unwaveringly beautiful, and the title implies the role of love in the narrative, perhaps as a source and a purpose for that beauty. Yet there is, at least for me, an undeniable pathos hidden somewhere in the imagery. Is it in the swirling movement of the compositions that suggests the moment of the painting is fleeting, or that it is already past and fading into memory? Is it simply an authentic representation of the vulnerability to pain and loss that love requires us to accept? Perhaps both. But I believe that in this particular exhibition, the pain resides at the edge of the canvas, at the boundary between the resolute hope and strength and love within, and the fear and isolation of the world beyond. In this moment of unprecedented global crisis, I believe that these works are a manifesto – of faith in the future, faith in humanity, and faith in the role of art in life and society – that challenges us to look beyond the suffering around us. And although these works require us to confront that suffering, which is thrown into sharp relief by the brightness of their beauty, they are a manifesto that I accept and support without reservation.

ARTIST Q & A: DARLENE COLE ON HER LATEST EXHIBITION KISSING TREES

"Kissing Trees
(wild roses)"
in the artist's studio

In advance of the artist's upcoming exhibition Kissing Trees, Bau-Xi Gallery sits down with Darlene Cole to learn more about her process. To offer a deeper perspective on Cole's conceptual touchstones, we asked her to comment specifically on one painting from the exhibition which captures the essence of this latest series.

Q: Your recent series “Kissing Trees” is, in your words, an exploration of the “wildly private”—the feeling that nature is a “room” or interior with its own sense of comfort and intimacy, but also an element of play, or danger. The figure in this painting—“Kissing Trees (stepped on a feather bed)”—appears to be inside a semi-abstract world of nature. Where is she? What is she thinking?

Darlene Cole: There are particular trees that I visit often in the historic parts of neighbouring towns. Every Saturday I walk by a pair of magnolias…which I believe may be evergreen magnolias (they had some blooms in September and still have their leaves in November). In full bloom, these trees are all-encompassing; I wanted this painting to have the feeling of a union between the figure and the canopy of the magnolia. There is very much an abstract quality to the blooms, and when I stand back there is such a haunting beauty to them as they converse with one another. I wanted to come closer to the Magnolia as I was painting, as if to preserve and protect it. At the same time, the figure could be viewed as the protector of the tree—a reciprocal relationship that works when both sides are listening. 

Q: Do you have ‘characters’ in the exhibition—I am thinking particularly of the woman in “Kissing Trees (unravel)” who wears a period hat in a three-quarter pose. I know each painting is a ‘relative’ of another, so wonder if this work has any companions.

Darlene Cole: The figures in “Kissing Trees” are wrapped up in textures/fabrics. The hat in “(unravel)” echoes the unraveling of silk or velvet ribbons and flowers. Rather than looking into the past, I wanted to contemplate the future with the simplicity of the blush background. I hope that all of the paintings in my show could be companions with one another in conversation. As I work in the studio, it is part of my comic relief to pair paintings side-by-side — often introducing two very different paintings—only to find to my surprise a great quirky conversation.

Cole's first concept sketch for "Kissing Trees"

Q: What is your relationship to palettes? In this piece, light, airy rose is anchored by deeper, mossy tones. The balance of values seems to say something about the narratives which inform your work. Can you speak to this marriage of form and story a little bit?

Darlene Cole: I think that there is a conscious tension—a mystery that I am layering in each painting.

Q: Can you tell me about the title: both “kissing trees”—which is your series title—and “(stepped on a feather bed)”?

Darlene Cole: We were driving on some back roads in a rainstorm. The rain was creating streams of water in the mud and the wind was bending the trees as they canopied over the road. In the fury of the storm I couldn’t help but think that the trees were comforting each other as they “kissed” over the road. There was something cinematic about it all, like an orchestra building to a climax. “(stepped on a feather bed)” is like hitting that moment of calm when you are caught in a moment. The feathers allow you to pause and sink in. I’ve always been intrigued with the interior existing in the landscape. The feather bed is a reference to that.

At a nearby estate, I experienced a smoke tree in full bloom. I went back a couple of days later with my paint smock and walked around the bowing branches in my bare feet. The sensation of the moss under my feet and the “smoke” around my head transported me. It is this union of nature and humanity—landscape and figure—that transcends me and makes me aware of the fragility of nature and how important it is for our bodies to listen and to feel nature. “Kissing trees”—they are whispering to listen, to feel, to protect.

The artist, Darlene Cole, visiting her inspiration

Q: The magnolia motif has appeared before in your paintings; what is your relationship to this imagery?

Darlene Cole: The magnolia fascinates me—hauntingly beautiful, the duality that it represents: fragility and strength. The blooms of the magnolia were pollinated by beetles because the trees appeared before bees did.

Q: Each of your paintings incorporates a marker of innocence—a child, a rabbit—some signal to memory. What is your marker in this latest series?

Darlene Cole: Kissing Trees incorporates a few markers: the rabbit, a clock, palm trees, and a crazy quilt— one that was left unfinished that I purchased from an antique dealer while working on this body of work. I see the quilt as a reference to Canada’s recently celebrated history, and particularly to women’s labour. I can feel the quilt in present tense more so because of its raw state and I see beauty in that. Many of the quilt’s colours are echoed in this show, the velvets particularly.

Darlene Cole's vintage quilt

ARTIST Q&A: EXPERIENCE THE INTIMATE WORLD OF DARLENE COLE

'THE INTIMATES' BAU-XI GALLERY TORONTO, DECEMBER 3-18, 2016

We recently sat down with artist Darlene Cole for a conversation about her upcoming exhibition, 'The Intimates'.

 How do you approach creating a new series?

 a) A new playlist!

 b) I find that working on a small scale in the beginning gets me to the gritty raw bits of what I want to say and feel... I immediately know if it has the push and pull that I want.

 c) I draw from what is around me, human to human, relationships, pathways, landscapes, visits to antique shops in Old Ontario, my artist retreat, etc.

For 'The Intimates' I bought a new Moleskine sketchbook and some yummy chalk that feels like I'm on a boat when I work with it. It is a green/grey blue...like a wild lake colour. I've been drawing (rather habitual) while standing at an old table that came from a historical building in Belleville, Ontario. The table is painted in an 'as found' glossy blue/grey colour that I can see the shadow of my hand in as I draw. Although I'm a bit of a nighthawk, I draw only during the day under natural light. It is an intimate experience with the music, daylight, the soft chalk on cream paper on the old table.

How do you know when you've chosen the perfect 'theme' for the show?

I keep bits of green masking tape on my walls in the studio...words or phrases that often have dual meanings. I might hear words in songs as I'm working, or often they just come to me at odd times...unloading the dishwasher or drying my hair. My work is truly on my mind all the time...like fine webbing that joins one thought to another as I move from space to space. The title for the show has to feel right in my space as I walk around this old house. It has to feel right with the ceiling height, the light filtering in...it is like part of the plot somehow or a hint of the setting...it has to 'fit' into my world...and make your cheeks blush a bit when you think of it.

What element of your work do you visualize first?

The feeling...the atmosphere of the painting.

How long will you work on paintings for 'The Intimates'? 

I never know the answer to this question...but with 'The Intimates', the small scale paintings may continue perhaps for a museum show... 

Which elements of your familiar imagery will turn up in this show?

The white rabbit, the dress, the boat, the fawn, the horse, the curtain, roses and peonies...

Do you have any surprises for us?

Palm trees, perhaps a violin, some leopard print and a honey container from WWII...

Constellation Magazine

TorontoHOME Magazine, November 2013