John Cole

John Cole was a British-born American painter who made his home in Bellingham, Washington for over 30 years. Favoring abstraction over literal description, Cole’s style evolved out of his European background and American modernist influences. His primary subject was the Northwest landscape but he also favored still lifes and figurative works.

Cole studied at Pasadena City College, California and the Pratt Institute, New York. From 1962 through 1967, he traveled and worked in Florida and Southern California and in 1968 he moved to Washington State. He began exhibiting in the early 1970s and by the end of the decade he was regularly featured at regional galleries. In 2003, the Whatcom Museum of History and Art presented a retrospective exhibition of Cole's paintings and the Museum of Northwest Art held a memorial exhibition in 2014.