"Joe Coleman (b. 1955) has been known through the last decades as an "infernal machine", a "fish-fucking satanist" and by the Charles Manson qoute "Joe Coleman is a caveman in a spaceship!". His early days as a wild and unhinged performance artist were documented in the Re/Search "Pranks!" book, which hardly mentioned that he was a painter. Later, his paintings has reached a large audience and fan base through cover art for many of the Amok and Feral House books, like "You Can't Win" and "Apocalypse Culture". Also, the two Coleman "solo" books "Cosmic Retribution" and "Original Sin" gives a great and impressive view into his visuals. The former also includes his early b&w illustrations of the life stories of the killer Carl Panzram and the travelling hobos Boxcar Bertha and Jack Black. Nowadays he's doing paintings that requires him to use a magnifying lens and brushes that are down to just one hair. When seeing his work reproduced, one imagines that the paintings are huge, but they're actually only 20 to 25 inches wide.
What Coleman does is often called "outsider art". The original term was "art brut", and referred to mentally disturbed artists like the unschooled and schizophrenic Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), who started painting at the age of 31, after being institutionalized for raping a 5 year old girl. The term "outsider art" today encompasses all sorts of intuitive, visionary art, self-taught art and contemporary folk art. The main characteristics of outsider art according to the experts are "dense ornamentation", "compulsively repeated patterns", "enigmatic calligraphy" and "wayward symmetry". All of this certainly applies to Coleman's work, but Coleman is also separate from the "outsiders" because he has some formal education, a huge knowledge of art history and an acute awareness of his own psychology." by Jan Bruun
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