Robert Cole draws, paints, composes, and writes but his heart belongs to metal. “Basically, I’m a modern classical Greek sculptor,” says Cole. “My job is to find new ways to represent the human figure, something we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.” Cole’s art has won a gold medal at the Florence Biennale and appears in public parks, nightclubs, commercial businesses, and venues including the Merriweather Post Pavilion and the Pimlico Race Track. His sculptures have found their way into countless private collections and onto The Steve Allen Show, known today as The Tonight Show. His visions of humanity range from tabletop size busts to giant creations that can only be moved by cranes and flat bed trucks. Like all art, the pieces have unique stories, and in this case are linked to the interesting background of their creator.
Born in Wyoming, Cole is the son an Army colonel. The family moved at the whim of the military. Creativity emerged early, showing up in unexpected but prophetic ways. “When I was in high school I had a train set but I never ran the train, because it was more fun to build the scenery the train ran through,” says Cole, “I loved to make things.”
No matter what he did or where, art was somehow involved. In 1960, Cole enlisted in the army. His artistic skill landed him in the sign making shop where he created charts and graphs for battalion commanders. After a two and a half year hitch, he was discharged and attended art school in Philadelphia. Here, he traded paintbrush for palette knife, progressively gravitating towards three-dimensional art. During school he supported himself by working in a nearby lamp factory. He built models used to create molds for metal casting, another indication as to where he was heading.
While in Philadelphia, Cole set up camp in a carriage house and began experimenting with an increasingly popular material: plastic. He took his casting knowledge to California where, in addition to sculpting, he briefly branched into woodwork, building acoustic guitars, mandolins, violins, cellos, and harps. Then, as luck would have it, he stumbled into the Hollywood art scene in a very Hollywood way.
“I was having dinner in a restaurant, enjoying myself, and I met this woman who turned out to be Shani Wallis, [she] was the star of Oliver,” says Cole. “Her husband, who was an agent, ended up becoming my agent.” The chance encounter changed Cole’s life.Wallis’s husband booked Cole on The Virginia Graham Show and on Dialing For Dollars, where Cole showed his surreal sculptures. When the intrepid agent noticed that one of Cole’s sculptures resembled talk-show host Steve Allen, Woody Allen’s older brother, he called Allen with the flattering news. Cole soon appeared, debuting his art live on national network TV—the moment marked a highpoint early in his career. A successful gallery opening followed and, for the next fifteen years, Cole would build upon his artistic reputation. By 1984, though, Cole was becoming artistically weary of synthetics. At the same time he found himself being pulled back east by family connections.
“A guy turned me onto metal and I got to fool around with that,” says Cole, “like wood or leather, it’s a real material, so when you’re finished with it, you’re actually done.” Cole set up a makeshift studio in the garage where he began working on something totally unique. “Nobody was doing figurative work in metal and I was drawn by the difficulty,” recalls Cole. “I tried to hammer a figure in metal but I didn’t know how to hammer a face yet.” Inspired by the local art scene, Cole bought a carriage house near Dupont Circle in 1990, planting roots in D.C. He gutted it, renovated, and set it up as a working studio to indulge his new passion—turning hunks of metal into works of art. Bronze is the preferred medium of metal sculptors because of its malleability, but Cole liked steel.
“That’s where I started because it’s very cheap compared to bronze,” says Cole. “It also rusts real quick and I like rust—but it stains concrete.” Staining started to become an issue for Cole as he increased the size of his figures to proportions that wouldn’t fit in most living rooms. He wanted more people to experience his art but first he had to master another material.
“For large, public pieces they prefer stainless steel, which still stains, but it stains less,” says Cole with a laugh. Working with large stainless pieces led to higher visibility and subsequent commercial gigs. The trade-off for his growing fame was a tremendous amount of man-hours and psychic drain. “Every time I do a big piece I reach a point where I feel like falling down and crying, because I’m thinking ‘it’s too big, I can’t build this,’” says Cole.
Despite moments of self doubt, Cole has built dozens of larger than life creations that stand guard over rock concerts in public venues, inspire college students, and bring home gold medals from distinguished European art shows. But creating art on a smaller scale comes with it’s own challenges and rewards.
“There’s an intimacy there and speed because you can make them swifter,” says Cole. “But they are hard to control. The smaller you go, your tools have to go down and you end up working with jewelers tools.” Whether he’s working on a ten-foot rendition of a reclining Buddha or a 24-inch casting of one of his signature pieces, the medium of choice remains metal.
“Metal is wonderful,” says Cole “it’s like forever, it has permanency.It’ll be there for your children, your children’s children. It can go outdoors or inside and each kind of metal has it’s own quality.” For Cole, inspiration comes from the most common yet infinitely fascinating source. “It can be the way a person stands,” says Cole, “certain gestures and movement. I want to try and capture that and make the sculpture feel like it’s about to move. I’m trying to get a sense of life.”
Cole’s base of operations remains his D.C. carriage house studio that he’s re-engineered into a work and gallery space. To make more room for overhead cranes, welders, grinders, and cutting tools, he and his wife Susan moved out and bought a home just a block away. The studio, itself a work of art, functions occasionally as an informal performance venue for plays and small concerts. It also serves as the primary marketing site for Cole’s biannual art show that occurs each spring and fall.
Artistic dedication and a creative approach to life can be seen in the studio and in all of Cole’s works, regardless of the size or the mix of materials. A single new room or a park full of finished work brings joy to any artist, but for Cole the journey provides as much pleasure as the final destination. “It’s always a feeling of joy when you’re finished and hopefully you’ve come close to accomplishing what you’ve set out to do. But the process of seeing it come to life, the creative tricks to make that happen, is fun and inventive. Solving it is the fun part.”
CLICK HERE for a gallery of Robert Cole sculptures.
Scott Sowers is a frequent contributor to ChesapeakeHome.
Contacts:
Robert Cole: studiocole.com or 202-387-3568
