ABOUT
Tobiah Cole
BIOGRAPHY
I have found myself living in college towns throughout my life. I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My parents were graduate students there.
When I was two, we moved to Madison, Wisconsin where I spent my early childhood in the late sixties and early seventies. I grew up around art. My father was making large oil paintings in the living room. I decided to become an artist at a very early age. It seemed very natural. As a child I thought artists had magical powers.
When I was in fourth grade we moved to Oak Park, outside of Chicago. While in high school I took painting and print making classes in the early college program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1988 I received a bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute.
I also spent two years studying painting and drawing at the New York Studio in New York, New York. During the summer of 1989 I attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Connecticut.
After my undergraduate studies I spent five years living in the south of France, Toronto, Berlin, and New York.
In 1993 I settled more or less permanently in Athens, Georgia where I worked, bought a house, built an art studio and pursued my painting. In 2005 I received a Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
I have shown my work at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, The Georgia Museum of Art, the Fay Gold Gallery, the Bill Lowe Gallery, and the Ty Stokes Gallery.
ARTIST STATEMENT
WORKING PEOPLE : Toby Cole
I started painting portraits of coworkers of mine at a restaurant I worked at called The Grit last August. Initially the intention was to paint people who were close and familiar to me. I felt the need to paint what was going on around me. Some of the people in these paintings I have worked with for years.
I took cell phone photographs of my subjects standing in front of a brick wall outside the back door The Grit. Some of the photographs were made after a busy shift. I photographed cooks, managers, and servers. These cell phone pictures would become the references for my paintings. My cellphone is inexpensive and the it’s camera is adequate but nothing remarkable. The grainy images soften edges and left room for me to interpret what I saw.
I stopped using solvents with my paints and brushes. Initially I decided to do this to find a nontoxic way to continue painting. It changed a lot of the ways that I approached painting. I was forced to lose some of my old habits and attachments to how I approached my paintings. I had to learn to handle paint in unexpected ways that I found liberating.
Click here to view some of my Working People Portraits.
