"Let There Be War"

Zoot Coffee

When I met Kenny Cole for the first time, I had been teaching too much and my own paintings were going badly. Not really an excuse but there is no telling what I will say out loud under those circumstances. Plus, Kenny bought me a chai. So there was caffeine.

“What do you want?” I asked him when we were both seated at Zoot, the busy, trendy coffeehouse in Camden, Maine. God bless him, he plunged right in. Mr. Cole wanted me to write about him.

Hmmm...over his shoulder I could see some of his paintings. Before he had arrived I had looked at the work up close, as artists do, checking out the surfaces, the brushwork, the materials involved. And, of course, the subject matter. In each painting, tiny or huge, airplanes screamed, flames erupted. Grimacing Santas inexplicably threatened to punch or be punched by hideously sinewed black humans while leprechauns looked on from the shrubbery. The colors bordered on garish. The gouache paint was laid on flat and the figures often outlined in the manner of comic book artists.

The exhibit, entitled “The Shroud Cycle: Let There Be War” was a ferocious portrait and critique of our rapacious society, with its wars and greed and racist caricatures. The painting, “The Last Drop of Water”, (62x46”), one attempt at a more painterly approach in acrylic on canvas, shows a gigantic blue drop of our most precious liquid as the focal point, while menacing soldiers push in from the shadows. That damned Santa and his African American adversary stare each other down on either side. Every character in the picture quite fittingly has blood on his hands, including the politicians grabbing at the contested water from the foreground.

“I hate it”, I told him.

Well, of course that brought us to Guston, who Cole “bows down before”. Guston, that pre-eminent creator of ugly narratives. Other loves? Goya, Ensor, Bosch, Spero. The influence of these artists, particularly Ensor’s palette and Bosch’s jostling squirmers are present in the huge, multi-panelled painting “Let There Be War II '' (88x112”). In every square inch of this monumental gouache painting on rice paper, golden-haired men wrestle and preen and wield clubs. Leprechauns leer and argue. And then, just when all hope seems lost, a group of beautifully delineated polar bears rises in the upper left, like a tall, cold drink sipped while riding on a sweaty subway car.

The engines propelling all of this artistic activity and Cole’s frenetic exhibiting schedule in Midcoast Maine are moral activism and the love of the act of painting. Cole has found a further source of inspiration in his Catholic history - the eponymous Shroud that is supposed to bear Christ’s sweaty imprint. After discovering the propensity of folded rice paper for creating compelling ink blots suggestive of the Shroud of Turin, he used these as a jumping off place to create the panoramic works on display at Zoot. (An interesting side discussion: why does symmetry seem ecclesiastical?)

Cole says this work suggests “the theatre of battle”. Indeed. Or as Robert Creeley once described Phillip Guston’s late work: “ a denseness of anxieties and sorrows, like a nightmare world of forms which are all exact and there.” I am hopeful that Kenny Cole will break free of the constraints of his current illustrative habits and plunge into paint up to his elbows. Lets see what you can really do, Mr. Cole.

Karen Jelenfy

November 2023