Joe Coleman

b. 1955 · Brooklyn, New York, USA

He paints one square inch a day through jeweller’s goggles, building portraits of America’s saints and murderers that take years to finish.

The life

Coleman was born in 1955 in Norwalk, Connecticut, grandson of a prizefighter, and drew violent, macabre pictures from childhood, steeped in the bloodier imagery of his Catholic upbringing. He moved to New York in 1973, drove a taxi, spent two years at the School of Visual Arts and staged notorious performances as Professor Mombooze-o, one of which ended in a 1989 arrest for possession of an infernal machine. From the late 1980s his paintings found their audience, and retrospectives followed at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2007 and KW in Berlin. He occupies a contested but permanent place in outsider art, and his collectors include Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The work

Acrylic on panel, painted with single-hair brushes under magnifying goggles at a rate of about a square inch a day, each work taking months or years. He borrows the structure of saints’ lives to paint obsessive, text-crammed portraits of figures like John Dillinger, Charles Manson, Anna Nicole Smith and Henry Darger, asking why America venerates its monsters. Work is held by the American Visionary Art Museum and the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris.

Why we love them

The patience of an icon painter aimed at everything polite society looks away from. Nobody stares harder or longer.

Go deeper

• Joe Coleman at the Outsider Art Fair
• Joe Coleman on Wikipedia
• Joe Coleman official site
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

← Back to the field guide