Born and raised in Finland, he received a B.F.A from the Massachusetts College of Art, and an M.F.A. from Yale University. After 26 years of teaching art at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, he retired to Deer Isle to pursue painting full-time. Kola’s paintings, often monumental in scale, appear almost photo-realistic from a distance, but closer inspection reveals deeply textured, almost pointillist brushwork. While his subjects are often drawn from local rocky beaches, snow-covered trees or volcanic landscapes in Iceland, some of the paintings work equally well as abstractions.