Joe Coleman

Painter

Joe Coleman was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States on November 22nd, 1955 and is the Painter. At the age of 68, Joe Coleman biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.

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Date of Birth
November 22, 1955
Nationality
United States
Place of Birth
Norwalk, Connecticut, United States
Age
68 years old
Zodiac Sign
Sagittarius
Profession
Choreographer, Painter
Joe Coleman Height, Weight, Eye Color and Hair Color

At 68 years old, Joe Coleman physical status not available right now. We will update Joe Coleman's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Height
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Weight
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Hair Color
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Eye Color
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Measurements
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Joe Coleman Religion, Education, and Hobbies
Religion
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Hobbies
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Education
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Joe Coleman Spouse(s), Children, Affair, Parents, and Family
Spouse(s)
Nancy Pivar ​ ​(m. 1981; div. 1990)​, Whitney Ward ​(m. 2000)​
Children
Not Available
Dating / Affair
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Parents
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Joe Coleman Career

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, 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. His collectors have included Mickey Cartin, Iggy Pop, Johnny Depp, Jim Jarmusch, Leonardo DiCaprio, D.B. Doghouse, H.R. Giger, and Adam and Flora Hanft.

The first exhibitions of Coleman's paintings were held at Lower East Side and Soho art galleries, Wooster, Chronocide, Limbo and Civilian Warfare, in 1986 and 1987. Chronocide's Bob Behrens would become Coleman's first dealer. Victoria and Albert Museum curator David Owsley, whom Coleman had met after picking him up his cab, bought a piece from one of his shows at Chronicide and hung it next to a Breughel in his collection. Owsley would also introduce Coleman to Mickey Cartin, who became the biggest collector of his work and convinced him to stop driving a cab and devote himself to painting full-time. In the late ’80s and early ‘90s, Coleman had solo shows at Psychedelic Solution in Greenwich Village and Billy Shire's gallery, La Luz de Jesus, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. His first European show was held in 1998 at London's The Horse Hospital, formerly a Victorian-era stable to house the sick horses of cab drivers.

In 2006, Coleman had a mid-career retrospective at New York's Jack Tilton Gallery entitled Joe Coleman: 30 Paintings and a Selection from the Odditorium, curated by Steven Holmes. Among those who saw it were French journalist Clement Dirie who arranged for the show to travel to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in March 2007, and German curator Susanne Pfeffer, who invited Coleman to exhibit at the K-W Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and commissioned David Woodard to pen an essay for the accompanying catalog.

For the K-W Institute show, now entitled Joe Coleman: Internal Digging, Pfeffer expanded the exhibit, to include all aspects of Coleman's work, as a painter, performance artist and also as a curator of the Odditorium, his personal museum. Taking over all four floors of the K-W Institute, visitors entered the show by walking into a cavernous ground floor space occupied by the sights and sounds of the Odditorium, largely housed in three German circus wagons. Each subsequent floor featured a different aspect of Coleman's oeuvre. Musician, actor, and outsider artist Bruno S., the star of Werner Herzog's Stroszek, was personally invited by Coleman to play the dinner following the exhibition's public vernissage. The K-W Institute show is the largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date of Coleman's work. New York's Dickinson Gallery exhibited a number of Coleman's paintings together with paintings by Hans Memling and other 15th century early Netherlandish painters, in a 2008 show entitled Devotio Moderno: Joe Coleman/Northern Primitives, to draw attention to both the devotional aspect and use of religious and a personal iconography in Coleman's paintings. The show included the 1999 painting, The Book of Revelations, which depicted Coleman and his wife Whitney Ward, encircled by a rainbow and riding atop a demon. They are surrounded on either side by friends and family who attended their wedding at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, while their symbolizing enemies are pitching into the fires of hell below them. The frame of the painting is adorned with blood-stained pages of the Book of Revelation from a miniature bible.

Two years later, in 2010, Dickinson put on a solo show by Joe Coleman, Autoportrait, that included the first public viewing of Doorway To Joe, a life-size self-portrait Coleman had painted over the course of four years. Doorway to Joe was exhibited again, with its companion painting Doorway to Whitney, a life-size portrait of Whitney Ward, completed in 2015, and unveiled at Unrealism, a show of figurative art curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian at Art Basel Miami in December 2015.

The two paintings also formed the center-piece of another large retrospective of Coleman's work, entitled ''Doorway to Joe'', held in 2017 at the Begovitch Gallery, California State University, Fullerton.

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