Photograph by Robert Scheer
Artist Prentiss Cole stands before his mixed-media creation, "Samsara Wheel of Fortune."
By ANNE GELHAUS
Before he decided to lead the artist's life, Prentiss Cole designed solar-energy systems for a Sunnyvale engineering firm.
"I came to the conclusion that it wasn't meant to be my life's work," says Cole, whose art is on exhibit at the Sunnyvale Creative Arts Center Gallery.
Yet Cole says the engineer in him comes through in his art. He creates three-dimensional pieces using materials like fiberglass screen, Mylar and acrylic paint.
"I like to deal with the mechanics of putting things together and the actual installation [of my works]," Cole says. "I've always leaned toward making things with familiar industrial materials. I didn't get a chance to work with traditional art tools until I went back to school in midlife."
With an engineering degree from MIT and a master of fine arts degree from San Jose State University, Cole through his education has achieved a balance between his cerebral and creative selves. He says he attempts a similar balance in his art work.
"What I'm concerned with is finding a balance between external realities and internal qualities like the soul and the spirit," Cole explains. "My work has a very physical presence, but I hope it would cause people to look inward to their own experiences for meaning, for whatever they want to take from it."
All the works in Cole's Sunnyvale show contain written text. Some tell a story. For instance, Cole created "What am I going to do?" during a bout with depression a few years ago, painting his thoughts on an aluminum screen, which he then mounted onto a silicon rubber backing. The text reads in part: ". . . feeling such great discomfort because I have no desire to do anything. . . I could go get something to eat. . . Sooner or later I guess I'll have to come to terms with not being able to do anything (let alone something important)."
"That was a spontaneous expression of feeling," Cole says of the work. "I went into my room, closed the door and said, 'I'm going to face this.' "
In other works, Cole has arranged pairs of antonyms against different backdrops. "Samsara, Wheel of Fortune" is a circle made up of circles of aluminum screen mounted on vinyl. Painted on the circles are word pairs like, "indulge/abstain," "relative/absolute" and "feel/think."
"I've always had an interest in supplementing the visual with the verbal," Cole says. "The concept of the material world is duality--birth and death, and so on--and my word pairings represent this duality."
Con-text: Constructions by Prentiss Cole, cosponsored by the Euphrat Museum of Art, shows through May 11 at the Sunnyvale Creative Arts Center Gallery, 550 E. Remington Ave.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, May 1, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.