"The worlds Coleman creates are not for the decorous or squeamish. Crude sex and cruder violence prevail in a world of cartoony brutishness, horrid deformities are flaunted, diseased guts spill and the pictorially unsayable is screamed aloud, but the disconcerting paradox is that each piece is as delicately crafted as a Feberge egg."
-- Anthony Haden-Guest, from his essay in The Book of Joe

Coleman’s portraits create complete biographies by surrounding their subjects with interweavings of minuscule images and explanatory text. Artist and viewer embark on exploratory excavations of the subject’s life through the painting. Coleman’s jewel-box approach means that one experiences the paintings afresh at each viewing, uncovering ever more details and nuances that were previously undetected.

An admirer of Northern artists such as Bosch, Brueghel and Grunewald, Coleman employs the same attention to detail and delicate sense of scale, utilizing dual and single haired brushes in conjunction with magnifying lenses to create his refined masterpieces. Like those artists, Coleman also displays a propensity for the gruesome and grisly and often attempts to both dissect and glorify the terrible in many of his paintings, unmasking with brutal honesty the truth of human nature."

Do not miss our PAINTING VIEWER, which will be updated every month or so with another painting to explore.