Rodin Shaw Cole

Poetry in imperfection.

Rodin Shaw Cole is a Boston-based artist whose work is a meditation on Asian decorative arts and culture. He grew up in Pittsfield, in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

Rodin works with traditional materials and techniques, above all those of Sumi-e, the Japanese art of ink painting. He is drawn to the asymmetrical compositions of traditional Asian art, and his works hold that Eastern sensibility.

He paints for concentration and discipline, and for Rodin discipline means being content with flaws. The pursuit of perfection had long frustrated him, its pressure undoing his focus. In Sumi-e he found that nature is sinuous and imperfect, and that there is poetry in imperfection.

His recent work is made on antique Japanese documents (account books, loan ledgers, handwritten correspondence) worked over in ink, gouache, print and collage. Western chairs, porcelain jars and paper lanterns recur across it, set against the paperwork of other lives.

Alongside the works on paper he makes monoprints and one-off textile pieces, carrying the same vocabulary of pattern, chop and script into cloth.

The characters 罗丹, which appear in his work, are the Chinese rendering of the name Rodin.