Jonathan Cole; artist who founded Project Art Works for people with disabilities
Hyfler/Rosner
Jonathan Cole
Gifted artist who turned his talents to helping those with
learning disabilities
Kate Adams
Thursday May 3, 2007
Guardian
Jonathan Cole, who has died aged 44 in a road accident in
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was an artist and co-founder of
Project Art Works, an organisation that creates
opportunities for people with complex disabilities to make
art.
Born in Fareham, Hampshire, Jon was the second of five sons.
His father was a headteacher and lay Baptist preacher, and
as a boy Jon willingly accompanied him on many of his
itinerant preaching engagements. He was educated at St
Olave's grammar school in Orpington, Kent, and then studied
fine art at Bristol Polytechnic. Graduating with a
first-class degree he went on to the Royal Academy schools
between 1986 and 1989 and won several scholarships and
awards including the De Segonzac travel scholarship in 1989
that enabled him to study in Italy for several months.
The quality of Jon's painting and the interest it attracted
led him into the heart of the London art scene. This did not
sit well with his innate humility and in 1992 he moved to
Hastings, Sussex.
In 1997 Jon and I co-founded Project Art Works. In our work
in schools for children with severe learning disabilities,
we explored the use of materials and techniques including
casting, etching and painting to directly express form,
movement and gesture. Jon saw himself as a facilitator whose
knowledge of materials and processes enabled each child,
whatever their cognitive or physical ability, to leave a
record or trace of a moment of experience.
Exceptionally gifted in his ability to "connect", Jon always
remained calm when confronted with someone who used none of
the formal, learnt methods of interaction. His patience and
courage enabled people with even the most severe autism and
cognitive impairment to explore a creative situation in
their own way and at their own pace.
His work developed into a series of dynamic interventions
through projects that tested the impact of environment on
learning and creativity. He used a large geodesic dome as an
external space to run painting and film workshops in special
schools in Hackney, east London, Brighton and Hastings. He
constructed the dome in the school grounds and this
satellite space interacted with the elements, charging the
workshops with energy and surprise.
During the past 10 years Project Art Works activities have
been exhibited at the Brighton Festival, the Millennium
Dome, the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Tate Modern
and other venues. Primarily a painter, Jon continued to
pursue his work privately and most often at night. He tended
to avoid the mainstream art world, preferring instead to
organise independent exhibitions most notably in Berlin
(1996 and 1998), Mumbai, India (1998), St Bartholomew's
Church, Brighton (2000), Spitalfields, London (2001),
Newchurch, Romney Marsh (2002) and the Arch Studio, Hastings
(Coleshaw, Sound and Painting, 2006).
Much of his painting was produced in series, enabling him to
fully explore pictorial ideas. The Jon the Baptist series is
a group of paintings of the truncated male torso in which
the body is treated as an emblematic device. Most recently
his compositions focused on trees simplified to skeletal,
almost abstract signs. He often reworked his failed and
rejected paintings as they presented a sort of "ready-made"
alternative to a blank canvas. These he would subject to a
process of sanding, scraping and re-painting, stripping the
image of all extraneous irrelevancies until he was left with
a residual sign of inexplicable significance. For Jon,
painting always remained a revelatory activity in which an
affirmation of life and faith could take place.
Unmoved by material trappings, he lived very simply, most
recently in his attic studio at "12 Claremont", a large,
elegant building in central Hastings that he bought with his
wife Caroline, and renovated as a complex of subsidised
artist studios.
The Cambodian documentary project that he was collaborating
on with his friend, the film-maker Tim Corrigan, when he
died, was a profile of Sam Rainsy, an opposition political
leader. He is survived by Caroline, his four brothers and
parents Brian and Linda Cole.
Charlotte Moore writes: George and Sam, my autistic sons,
both benefited from working with Jon Cole and the Project
Art Works team and it was at a series of workshops last
summer that I fully appreciated Jon's unique gift when he
worked closely with George, then 16, on two enormous
paintings. Jon guided George with acute sensitivity. George
has strong ideas about colour and will always limit his
palette; for his first picture he would only use blue, black
and white. He announced that he would paint "lightning on a
pond". Jon did not bombard him with suggestions; he worked
peacefully alongside, adding his own touches but always
pulling back if he felt that he was encroaching.
George, who is acutely self-conscious, achieved far more
than usual because he felt that Jon was taking some
responsibility for the (to George) almost frighteningly
dramatic swoops and slashes on the paper. Trust was quickly
established. For the second painting, Jon persuaded George
to add pink to vary the blues and greys, and this was quite
an achievement, because pink is one of George's "sacred"
colours, so intensely delightful that he cannot often bear
to use it. Another vivid, energetic painting emerged, a true
joint effort. The paintings were somewhat reminiscent of
Franz Kline, but also quintessentially George and Jon.
I will always remember the sight of them working side by
side, Jon in shorts and sandals, George in his preferred
summer garb of coat and wellingtons.
· Jonathan David Westlake Cole, artist and teacher, born
November 22 1962; died January 14 2007