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Mark Cole remembers vividly the first time he felt a strong connection to contemporary art. At the age of ten, attending an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, he caught sight of a video of a window curtain blowing in the wind. "I froze," he recalls, "because I remembered seeing a similar curtain blowing in the wind, and making up stories about why it was happening. It was such a personal connection that it made me realize the power and idiosyncratic nature of contemporary art."

Cole has "always" made art, even auditing art classes during his years in law school; but he never actually considered it as a profession until his early years as an attorney, when he began to have opportunities to exhibit his work. As his art career has developed, Cole has brought it into balance with his law practice, alternating project-based work as an attorney with months of concentrated studio time.

Cole's fascination with everything around him, his alertness to multiple associations, and his ability to pursue more than one interest at a time have grown out of a particularly rich and varied cultural background. Born in Houston, he moved with his family at the age of seven to Europe. He attended international schools in England, Holland and Canada, where the entire class for a given grade might number 20 students, representing as many as 15 different countries. The great museums of Europe were available to him at an early age, and he soon developed an appreciation for and interest in painting.

The son of an engineer father and a ballerina mother, Cole has chosen to pursue a form of painting that shows the influence of both parents. His use of industrial material (polyurethane plastic) and process (casting), and the precise, "finish fetish" look of his surfaces, combine with bright, delicate colors that could grace any stage. The resulting work impresses the viewer both with its directness and its subtlety, its practicality and its whimsy.

This kind of paradox is an important element in Cole's work. "Paradox makes us realize that things aren't black and white," he says. "There is always a fine line when a thing shifts from one side the other. That opening in the middle points to the fact that labeling is always an arbitrary exercise. It makes the work open-ended, so that there is always something left for the viewer to explore."

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