Frank D. Cole: The House Inside

Gallery Hours: Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 12 – 5 pm, and by appointment
Opening Reception: Saturday March 14th, 1-4 pm
Artist’s Talk: April 18, starting at 2 pm

Transmission Gallery is pleased to present The House Inside, recent paintings by East Bay painter, Frank D. Cole.

Working from his West Oakland studio, Frank Cole paints from a distance, both geographic and temporal. His large-scale works emerge from reflections on his childhood in Mississippi, with landscape, weather, and architecture forming an enduring visual vocabulary. In this work, Mississippi becomes less a fixed geography than a felt condition, a stand-in for memory and connection, suspended between clarity and dream.

Framed by porches, window casings, and thresholds, Cole’s paintings position the viewer in an interior space, looking outward. Beams, panes, and floorboards divide and measure the picture plane acting as armatures for recollection, holding in place fleeting impressions of light on water, wind through tall grass, or rain dissolving a stand of trees. The result is both architectural and narrative, emerging as quiet meditations on place and time, imbued with reverie and longing.

The paintings carry a subtle tension between shelter and exposure, presence and absence. No figures occupy these interiors; instead, the viewer becomes the inhabitant. The threshold functions as a metaphor for memory–a point where the past remains visible yet inaccessible.

Accompanying the larger canvases, small preparatory studies reveal the evolution of each composition. In these pieces, Cole tests structure, color temperature, and atmosphere. The studies function as concentrated meditations—intimate works where gesture and light are first explored before expanding into the larger paintings.

While rooted in a specific place, these recollections resonate beyond their origin, becoming a point of departure for a broader exploration of early embodied experience – how light filled a certain room, the rhythm of rain on a roof, the view framed by a familiar window. Through carefully constructed interiors and expansive vistas, Frank Cole transforms personal memory into a contemplative space others can inhabit.