If you’re outside looking in through the doorway of Joe Coleman’s new book The Art of Joe Coleman, you’ll discover a perfect picture of Joe’s world. Meet Joe’s daunting life and times as soon as you crack the cover. Open the door and you’ll be drawn to the imagery that makes him unique. The introduction by Tom Waits reads like a song. I could hear Waits singing it as I read. Joe paints with a one-hair-tipped brush, using magnified glasses, zooming in to execute his detailed visions. He doesn’t pull any punches in this hefty book. It’s a beautiful tribute to his life’s calling, personal inventory, spiritual devotion, and adamant philosophy of life imitating art, or vice versa. Full-page color prints of his paintings adorn almost every page of this collection.
Coleman’s dedication to detail is remarkable, and the often-controversial subject matter verges on obsession. The edition comes wrapped in a clear vinyl dust jacket to protect the cover and contents. The paintings stick with you, linger and you want more. Joe does extensive research on his subjects and includes vignettes of his topics incorporating history into intimate portraits of the famous and infamous. It’s a colossal body of work chronicling Coleman’s wild career, spanning half a century. His discipline as a chronicler of the past is both personal and public. The meticulous mindfulness is clear in every brushstroke executed.
I love his style, somewhere between the imagery of Hieronymus Bosch drinking wine with Dali, where Robert Crumb meets the Dutch Masters at a swanky art party in purgatory. I met Joe 30 years ago in Baltimore, at an exhibition at a small Folk Art Gallery. It was a showcase for outsider artists, housed in a brownstone townhouse in the Bolton Hill neighborhood behind the Maryland Institute of Art. Since that first introduction, we became fast friends, a small part of a larger, beautiful dysfunctional family. A freaky sideshow cast of characters. Joe and his wife Whitney were officially crowned the king and queen of last year’s Mermaid Parade in Coney Island. A fitting honor. Joe’s connection with Coney Island along with the sideshow by the sea goes back decades.
We shared musical tastes, hanging out in NYC and Baltimore. Joe introduced me to the likes of psychobilly musician Hasil Adkins and the grandson of Hank Williams Sr., Hank III. Joe shared his life along with his art, donning the cover, plus assorted page illustrations in Carl Watson’s 1997 book, Beneath the Empire of the Birds, published by Apathy Press Poets. The following is a recent phone interview with the artist.
Tom DiVenti: What are you working on now?
Joe Coleman: I’m working on another big one. It’s titled “Voyage to Candyland.” This old Victorian house we found, Whitney nicknamed the house Candy. All this stuff that happened trying to get this place. Since I don’t sketch it out, I don’t know where it’s going. Whitney has this big garden now, so there’s Whitney gardening in this one too. Theres also the cemetery, you know how the house from my childhood that was across the street from the cemetery? That house appears in my paintings. That’s in the painting, and the various places we lived, the Montague St. apartment and the dungeon on 86th St. It’s this voyage of searching for a home. Meanwhile all this other crazy shit is happening around us in the world. All our friends are dying. The cemetery that appears in a couple of the paintings, you know, from that childhood house, all the headstones are now, I make for whoever I just lost, I bury in the cemetery, I just keep adding it too as I am painting. It’s an autobiographical painting.
TD: I’m surprised you haven’t painted any paintings of Das Fuhrer.
JC: The Fuhrer?
TD: Trump.
JC: (laughing) I knew who you meant. He’s in a painting. You might find my subjects devote entire paintings to the pretty dark and twisted, but also in my mind they are sympathetic.
TD: They’re very human.
JC: Yeah, now Trump, I don’t feel the same way about so I couldn’t really devote that time to painting him.
TD: You’ve never been politically motivated.
JC: That’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m more interested in the losers; you know the ones that are kind of lost in either their madness or their depravity. I mean Richie Rich is having a field day with all the power and wealth, which is boring to me. In the new book, the painting “The Sorcerers Mirror,” Whitney and I look up at the skies discovering all these new exoplanets. At the same time all these other things are happening, the fires, global warming, extreme floods. If you look at the center of that painting, there are sculpted figures. On one side is Trump and on the other side there’s an old-school terrorist. They’re both ends of the same character. He’ll appear occasionally in a very minor way, but he’s not worth making an entire painting.
TD: Do you have anything coming up in NYC this year?
JC: I’m curating a show of works inspired by the carnival at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery opening in May. It’ll have a bunch of people who work in that kind of art. When I say carnival, I don’t just mean the sideshow, but also burlesque performers.
TD: Like examples of old banner art?
JC: Yes, I have the old crime show banners, the sideshow banners you see often but the crime show banners are extremely rare.
TD: How did you get Tom Waits to write the introduction for the book?
JC: I was honored to have him do that. It’s like having Homer write the introduction. He contacted me years ago to do a project with him, and we did that. I told him about the book, and he offered. I want to mention there’s a documentary film crew that’s working on a film. You remember the old documentary Rest in Pieces, but this crew have been filming Whitney and me for 12 years, but they’re also using archival footage. It’s a feature film that’ll be released this year. Its called How Dark My Love.
TD: I’d like to ask about your take on life, death, heaven and hell, if they exist without getting too philosophical.
JC: It’s a big question. I think it’s fluid. At my age, I feel that it’s not important for me to know what happens after I’m dead. Its not necessary. It’s like everybody wants to know those things but I think it’s unimportant because whatever it is, I’ll find out soon enough. But I do believe there are such things as heaven and hell, they exist right here. If there’s reason to fear the torments of hell, there’s hell on earth, but we can’t avoid it. It’s not even a punishment because often the innocent are punished along with the guilty. It’s an unavoidable fact of existence, of creatures that live, that they suffer. I think it’s one of the fundamental aspects of what life is. Life is this journey of pain and suffering. But it’s learning and seeking love and knowledge. I’m happy I made it this far. Whatever’s around the bend is around the bend. Whether you’re ready for it or not, it’s coming.