Overview

"Joe Coleman paints incredibly detailed portraits of sinners, saints, freaks, and personal friends that collectively present a dark history of America. Painting with a single-hair brush and a jeweler's loupe, the artist states he only knows when the painting is done because he runs out of room on the canvas. With a body of work that spans five decades (including his early work as a comic book artist), Coleman's work includes subjects such as Hank Williams, Ed Gein, Jayne Mansfield, and his wife and muse, Whitney Ward. Coleman not only captures his subject's likeness, but his portraits also serve as ambitious narratives of the subject's life. Told in lozenges scattered throughout the often-larger-than-life works, the portraits contain scenes from the subject's life and words and phrases. Coleman is not afraid to explore the dark reaches of the human psyche, but also portrays a distinct humanity in his subjects and often includes a touch of humor. A Doorway to Joe collects over 150 paintings and comprehensively illustrated sections and essays about Coleman's fine art, comics art, music career (as front man of the '70s punk band, the Steel Tips), performance art, and the artist's ""Odditorium,"" a private museum where sideshow objects, wax figures, crime artifacts and works of religious devotion live together to form a dark mirror that reflects the alternative side of the American psyche. Featuring a foreword by museum director Mike McGee, an introduction by musician Tom Waits, and essays by art critics, curators, and impresarios including Rebecca Lieb, Dan Cameron, Nicholas Hall, Darius Spieth, Steven Holmes, Kimiko Hahn, Latitia Ante Delictum, Jonathon Shaw, Monte Beauchamp, Clemens Marschall, Sara Fortson, Walton Ford, and Carlo McCormick."

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9781683968702

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Reviews

His meticulous, intricately detailed, psycho, eye-candy paintings give voice to a ragtag cast. Primarily a portraitist, Coleman paints intense tableaus of those mired in the suffering of the human condition. Experiencing one of his pictures grips the mind.-- Juxtapoz If P. T. Barnum had hired Breughel or Bosch to paint sideshow banners, they might have resembled the art of Joe Coleman.-- The New York Times

Author Information

Joe Coleman is a world-renowned painter, writer, and performer who has exhibited for five decades in major museums throughout the world including one-man exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Barbican Centre in London, and Tilton Gallery and Dickinson Gallery in New York. His collectors have included Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Anthony Bourdain, Leonardo DiCaprio, and H.R. Giger. He was the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary, Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman (1997) and lives with his wife Whitney Ward in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Mike McGee is director of the California State University, Fullerton, Begovich Gallery. Over the past thirty years he has authored and published dozens of books about contemporary art. He has also written for newspapers and periodicals in the United States and Europe. Tom Waits is an American singer songwriter, musician, composer and actor. Waits' lyrics frequently present atmospheric portraits of grotesque, often seedy characters and places. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is included among the 2010 list of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers, as well as the 2015 list of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. Waits lives in Northern Californiawith his wife and frequent collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, and their three children.

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