Joe Coleman

Of Coleman's work, the New York Times wrote that, “If P. T. Barnum had hired Breughel or Bosch to paint sideshow banners, they might have resembled the art of Joe Coleman.” While Berlin's Tagesspiegel said of Coleman, "Like [George] Grosz in the 1920s, he holds a drastic mirror up to his own times."

Coleman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

His apartment and studio, called the Odditorium, is a living museum to his obsessions; a collection of artifacts, objects and documents from wax museums, crime museums, churches, pathology museums and sideshows.

Coleman was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, to a World War II-veteran father and the daughter of a professional prizefighter.

Joseph Coleman (born November 22, 1955) is an American painter, illustrator, actor and performance artist.

He has been described as the "walking ghost of Old America" by his wife, photographer Whitney Ward, for his over-riding interest in the historical arcana and personae that often populate his paintings.

He has said his first collector was Lady Bird Johnson, who bought a painting he made of garbage in 1965 for a children's art collection, as part of her ‘beautification’ campaign.

In 1973 he moved to New York and supported himself by driving a cab.

“Times Square was a red light district,” said Coleman.

“I was a taxi driver back then, like Travis Bickle, but the stuff I saw in my taxi was way worse than that movie.” The street life he saw behind the wheel bled into his paintings and artwork from this period, which he described as ‘human-scapes’.

In 1977, he self-published two mini-comix and produced a portfolio of ten graphite on paper drawings (The Joe Coleman Portfolio) that with its depictions of outsiders, freak shows and both historical and present day tableau, showing life in all its raw, unfiltered, gory detail, set the tone, style and subject matter of his later work.

His first professionally published work appeared in issues of Bizarre Sex and Dope Comix, two underground comics titles published by Kitchen Sink Press.

He attended the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York for two years.

While at SVA he started performing with punk band The Steel Tips, who were immortalized in an early 1979 painting, styled as a sideshow banner.

The Steel Tips played at CBGB, as well as in strip clubs, a prison, an insane asylum, and a benefit for female alcoholics held in a church.

In 1982, Coleman self-published a full-length comic book, The Mystery of Wolverine Woo-Bait.

Taken as a whole, Joe Coleman's body of paintings presents an ongoing exegesis of his life, influences, obsessions, family and friends with a particular focus on the pathological and the psychological, the sacred and the profane, pop culture and high art, and the inter-relations between them.

He has painted portraits of a broad range of figures, both historical and contemporary, that include saints and sinners, writers (Edgar Allan Poe, Hunter S. Thompson, Louis-Ferdinand Celine), artists (George Grosz, Adolf Wolfli), madmen (Charles Manson), actors (Leo Gorcey, Jayne Mansfield), murderers (Ed Gein, Mary Bell, Albert Fish), musicians (Hasil Adkins, Hank Williams, Captain Beefheart), visionaries, freaks (Johnny Eck, Joseph Merrick a.k.a. the Elephant Man).

He has also painted portraits of obscure or controversial figures in American history (Boston Corbett; abolitionist John Brown; Swift Runner, a Cree Indian in the thrall of Wendigo psychosis).

Over the years, he has also painted portraits of many of his closest friends, including tattoo artist, writer, and painter Jonathan Shaw, and motorcycle builder and stunt rider Indian Larry.

He has also produced many self-portraits and numerous portraits of his wife and muse Whitney Ward.

The portrait paintings in particular are the fruit of Coleman's voluminous research into his subjects, which he has often compared to an archeological dig to excavate their true nature.

The portraits take the form of a large central figure surrounded by depictions of episodes in the lives of his subjects that contributed to the development of their pathology, and influenced the drives and motivations that determine the course of their lives.

Coleman did the original artwork for the posters for the movies Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Charles Manson Superstar.

He paints mainly using acrylic on wood panel, using a one-hair brush and viewing his work through jeweler's goggles.

The smooth surface of the wood panel allows him to paint to an extraordinary level of microscopic detail.

Through this painstaking process, he is able to paint an average of one square-inch a day.

Coleman does not make sketches or preparatory drawings of his paintings before embarking on them.

The paintings usually begin from one detail and grow almost organically.

It takes Coleman between one and four years to complete a single painting.

There is a ritualistic aspect to his work and the process by which he completes it.

The frames of his paintings are often decorated with symbols from his own personal iconography to contain the forces within.

Sometimes items of clothing or other artifacts related to his subject matter are appended to the painting.

Rather than sell his work through galleries and the art establishment, Coleman has long relied on a system of patronage common during the medieval and Renaissance periods that inform his work.

He has long-standing personal relationships with collectors of paintings, who are often able to view the work-in-progress that they will acquire.

Coleman's birth date (11/22/55) and childhood home address (99 Ward Street), which all feature palindromic numbers, has fed a lifelong obsession with duality, reflection and symmetry that is represented in his work; as in his 1994 painting Mommy/Daddy , a split portrait of his parents as two halves of the same body, standing over an image of his childhood home and the grave in which they are both buried.

Coleman’s mother was a devout Catholic and, as a child, Coleman spent many hours in church.

He would draw the stations of the cross in pencil using red crayon to represent the blood of the saints and Christ.

Around age 5, his mother gave him a book of paintings by Hieronymous Bosch.

Also obsessed with comics, especially EC Comics, he began drawing his own.