Ashley Cole was born in the creative crucible of Compton, California and raised in the shadow of the iconic Watts Towers, a monument to resilience, transformation, and community ingenuity. Hers is a story shaped by love, legacy, and the radical imagination cultivated in a nurturing, tight-knit neighborhood. She credits her early artistic instincts to the influence of her uncle’s meticulous colored pencil drawings and the vibrant graffiti that adorned her surroundings. These early experiences laid the foundation for a lifelong devotion to visual language.

Cole formally studied fashion design at Brooks College in Long Beach, where she honed an understanding of material, gesture, and form that would later resurface, reimagined, on canvas. Although trained in garment construction, it was painting that called her most urgently. She transitioned into the realm of fine art, channeling the energy of Abstract Expressionism through a deeply personal and improvisational lens. Her large-scale canvases often reminiscent of the lyrical, sculptural works of Sam Gilliam pulse with emotional intensity and tactile complexity. Her compositions frequently drape and lean asymmetrically against walls, or spill into space like jazz solos un contained and evocative. With works titled, Lemonade and  So What, Cole makes explicit her debt to jazz titans like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to R&B divas like the Queen B, Beyoncè, infusing her practice with the spontaneity, nuance, and narrative layering of musical improvisation and Black excellence.

​Raw, earth-toned grounds serve as surrealist landscapes for Cole’s automatist markings coded with song lyrics, angel numbers, and mnemonic ciphers that flirt with the language of graffiti. Burnt edges, cuts, and folds evoke skin, manuscripts, and topographies—each canvas treated as both map and mirror. Alchemic metal accents—lines in gold, silver, pastel, and purple—chart royal pathways that guide the eye through psychological and spiritual terrain. Rooted in her fashion background, sections of her paintings are delicately sutured with colored thread or twine, literalizing the mending of material and metaphor alike. Her process is iterative; she often revisits works, adding and amending until the piece declares its own completion. In a time marked by fracture and fragmentation, Cole’s practice offers an act of visual and emotional triage. Her interventions are gestures of healing—irreverent, raw, and transcendent. Her work does not resolve; it reverberates. It invites.