Cole paints urban and pastoral landscapes in a quick gestural semi-abstract style that foregrounds a strange beauty where one doesnít expect it and suggests the blur of movement. She researches the image, taking hundreds of photos from buses and trains, and places the window frame in the painting to highlight how most of us experience landscape. She uses flaring fluorescent colours, emphasising the road signs, the railway workers and the neon, investing the tradition with new oomph. Inspired by American photographer Ed Ruscha, Cole invests the banality of the car park with the same beauty as a rolling hill. A snazzy, sharp and fresh approach to painting that has the bathos of the new Belgian school of Luc Tuymans and Koen van der Broek

Cherry Smyth
Writer and Curator