Joe Coleman Portrait of a dark world - Out of Art

Translated text from Out of Art # 2012-2 pp. 24-30 © Out of Art
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Text: Eva von Stockhausen
Joe Coleman
Portrait of a dark world
“One doesn’t become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”, Carl Jung
Joe Coleman (Norwalk, Connecticut, 1955) used to be a scared little boy. Being short, he regularly felt
intimidated by the others kids at scouting. At home he often had a hard time, too. His father Joseph senior,
a war veteran who had fought in South-eastern Asia, was a traumatised man who drank a lot and abused
his family behind closed doors. His mother Jacqueline, a deeply religious beauty queen who had been
excommunicated by the Catholic Church, was emotionally dependent on her son and sometimes acted
improperly. To top it all off he lived opposite a scary graveyard.
Though home could be a grim place, there were rare moments when it did offer him a means of escape. Encouraged
by his mum, and using drawing materials given to him by his dad, little Joe started drawing. His inspiration coming
from his mother’s Bible and a picture book of Jheronimus Bosch’s work (ca. 1450-1516). The outcome were graphite
drawings of wars and martyred saints, in which blood often flowed abundantly.
Party Explosions
Fear often turns into anger, and through the years Coleman started to exhibit antisocial behaviour, but with a strong
symbolical portent: he set fire to the school field (“a creative act’) and in his teenage years he sometimes exploded
in public. Literally. These ‘party explosions’ often took place before an unwilling audience. He would strap a baking
sheet and explosives to his chest and crash parties of strangers, in order to blow himself up in front of unsuspecting
partygoers. It proved to be the basis for a glorious career as a performer and ‘geek’, during which he was to explode
in quite a few unexpected places and decapitate many a rodent with his teeth. Coleman: ”I would never be able to do
that today, but interestingly enough I seemed to have a clear vision of what the future was going to bring: suicide
bombers.” Anno 2012 he is active in the world of Burlesque, an often misunderstood art form in which originally
functional nudity, horror and humour come together.
Art school
In 1976 Coleman enrolled at the New York School of Visual Arts, but categorically refused to adapt to the reigning
abstract dogma. He was dismissed and started focusing on making comics. In the years that followed the growing
popularity of the comic and tattoo culture gave his career a great lift. Today both art forms are more popular
than ever. So is Coleman’s oeuvre, though in the 80’s his main focus shifted from comics to painting. A fortunate
circumstance was that from the very start there was an interested audience – a ‘cult following’ – for his work; first in
the comic scene, then in the world of Outsider Art and subsequently in the mainstream art world.
Mommy/Daddy
One of Coleman’s early paintings, Mommy/Daddy (1994), stems from childhood experiences. The two main subjects
of the painting – the artist’s father and mother – are presented here in the shape of one figure, who is placed at the
centre of the portrait. He/she seems frozen on the spot and offers the spectator a seemingly emotionless stare. In the
background there are numerous other, smaller portraits and events that tell us the life story of the people depicted.
Like the following, floating, image: mother Jacqueline is standing in the doorway of a darkened nursery and takes
a rather unsettling peek inside. Underneath, in elegant writing the following question: ‘Why did she undress in front
of me?’. Elsewhere, in one of the borders, Coleman’s mother is presented as a spider in a web. On the right-hand side
we witness father Joe senior’s chilling experiences during WWII. Right underneath we can see him getting drunk in
a bar. These are just two examples out of many. Like in the paintings of early Dutch masters like Jheronimus Bosch,
with whom Coleman feels a strong affinity, the spectator is almost inundated by the number of images that he is

presented with: pregnancies and war experiences, alcoholism and incest, sickness and death, and finally, at the very
bottom of the picture, both parents rotting in their graves.
Storyteller
Joe Coleman is a storyteller, his portraits first and foremost are narratives. Apart from family members, his work
frequently presents us with famous and infamous figures from (American) history, who are elevated to mythological
proportions: culture-historical icons like Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961),
famous outsiders like Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) and Henry Darger (1892-1973), but most of all criminals: cult leaders,
murderers, outlaws. Apart from that the artist himself predominantly is the main focus. Coleman has stated that all
his portraits are de facto self portraits. His own inner landscape is the main theme, and it is subjected to extensive
digging, in an attempt to make peace with himself and the world. Everything is presented in his work, including
those things that do not stand the light of day. Though Coleman’s oeuvre can be considered confronting, it never is
voyeuristic, caricature-like or derisive, but seems rather detached and observant.
“It’s most important to me, to not judge. You know, to let the subject tell the story. I’m letting the painting paint
itself, I’m letting the subject of the portrait tell me the story. I don’t want to tell it the story, or try to make any kind
of judgement of it.”
Two-haired paint brush
Considering this abundant imagery, many of Coleman’s paintings turn out to be smaller than expected. They
were created using a large magnifying glass and a one- or two-haired paint brush, the latter often having been
manufactured by the artist himself from horsehair. Sitting in his Odditorium, by the light of a single light-bulb, he
labours daily on his slightly unsettling oeuvre. For hours on end, ”inch by inch”, usually starting from the left-hand
corner. Interestingly enough, the protagonist often appears much later in the process. “I don’t know exactly why, but
things can pop up in different parts of the surface and they can grow together as well.”
Coleman works as if in a trance, not knowing how his inner dialogue will guide his hand one moment to the next.
Only once the panel is completely filled he abandons his work.**
Language
One thing that stands out is the extensive use of language. Coleman’s work is characterised by the fusion of images
and words. The latter in the shape of single phrases – CRUELTY, CANCER, castration, MOM – or short stories.
These narratives shed light on the main theme of the work and offer an insight into the emotion from which the
work stems: ‘My mother had to support the family because my father could not hold a job’. The words add an extra dimension
to the work; undulating and meandering (there are no straight lines), they also seem to have evolved organically.
Simultaneously the image is exceedingly fragmented by the insertion of texts. Coleman on the use of language in
his oeuvre: “(…) I play with different styles of text, with different layers and I think it connects to several different
things; it connects to my beginnings, working with comics and my love of illuminated manuscripts (…). I think the
paintings need… they have dialogue as well. I am talking to myself as I’m painting and am becoming the different
characters.”
Borders
Coleman’s portraits are often embellished with multiple, richly illustrated borders. These are the realm of all sorts of
mysterious creatures – from love goddesses and idols’ masks to disfigured babies – who often look out into the world with
the same fixed stare as the protagonist. Their abundance and alternation with various (esoteric) symbols and patterns
creates an even more dynamic image. The borders act as buffers, Coleman tells me, to protect him (and us?) from what is
going on in the painting. As a result, some works have more borders than others. “There’s one that I did, ‘Faith’, I think it
has the most borders. It was a way for me to deal with suicidal feelings at the time. With each stage of the painting I would
be working and it would be a way of….getting past killing myself. Since Whitney (Coleman’s wife), there have been less
borders.” It is true, in his newer work the phenomenon seems to have all but disappeared.
Outsider no more
Though Coleman is aware of cultural reality at large, he refuses to adapt to it. He simply doesn’t accept labels, ‘outsider’
being one of them. In 2004 he was given to understand that, after having been present for years, he was no longer
welcome at the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York. In retrospect, it’s hard to indicate an all compassing reason. Clearly,
his work had become very popular, which entailed higher prices. Concurrently, his short stint at art school 28 years earlier
was yet held against him. His expulsion meant his work was at risk of ending up in a commercial no man’s land. But he tells
me: “No, it hasn’t made a difference in my career (…). What I was hurt by was the fact that I knew these people, a lot of

them. And this was a place were followers of my work could actually meet me, they could go there. I think it’s kind of sad
that they needed to do that. I think they don’t even know what Outsider Art is.. I mean the whole term…the more you try
to put boundaries on it, the less value it has.”
Over the years Coleman’s work has been exhibited regularly at ‘mainstream’ art locations, like the Palais the Tokyo in Paris
and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. In 2008 a show in New York presented his paintings together with
works by artists of the Northern Renaissance; an important source of inspiration for him.
His work has also been exhibited in the Netherlands. In 2002 he participated in the ‘Wormhole’ group exhibition at the
Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. He was treated to an acerbic review in the NRC newspaper, in which the journalist
wondered ‘whether Joe Coleman creates paintings or comics’, and subsequently discovered that ‘once you’re standing close
to it, only then you discover the small letters and the many sordid details’.
Catholic pagan
Joe Coleman’s artistic oeuvre is both visceral and fascinating. On the surface his portraits appear to be all about violence
and victimhood; ‘perpetuum mobile’, evoking aversion and confusion. They seem to demand an explanation, a justification.
But the main objective of his art is to help us conquer our own fears (as spectators and as culprits). It has been professed
that when Christianity superseded the old pagan religions, the latter went underground. Today the old archaic gods are
assumed to live on in society’s underbelly: in Burlesque, in prison and in the imagination of the maladjusted, be it serial
killer or artist. Coleman’s portraits are like a tangible testimony to this theory. In his own words: “I consider myself a
Catholic, but at the core there is a pagan, definitely (…). You could call me a Catholic pagan.”
Through painting Joe Coleman has, since his youth, been on a nigh shamanic quest into his own inner world, in order to
get through to those layers of the subconscious where primal principles like fear, rage and the urge for self-destruction
dwell, as does (the longing for) love. Those of us who dare to unlock their own inner darkness this way, will be rewarded
with the greatest treasure: redemption.
** On www.joecoleman.com visitors can take a video-tour of the painting Mommy/Daddy
** On www.joecoleman.com ‘Work in progress’ shows us how one of Coleman’s paintings is created
Special thanks to Joe Coleman (who I interviewed on 19 July) and Whitney Ward,
to Simon Dickinson Gallery New York en the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
www.joecoleman.com