Gates of Heck: Joe Coleman: Interview with Joe Coleman

This four-hour interview with Joe Coleman was conducted by Katharine Gates in the Summer of 1994 for The Comics Journal.

GATES: So tell us the story of your life, Joe.

JOE COLEMAN: The story of my life... in four hours?

GATES: Mmm-hmm.

COLEMAN: I was born in Connecticut, number 99 Ward Street on the 11th month of the 22nd day of the year '55. It's fascinating for me because everything is double. It was a house that was across the street from the cemetery. The house itself, the foundation was built in the 1700s, so it had these wide floorboards and had this kind of comforting, haunted atmosphere to it.

Detail from Faith, 1996.

To me, the house itself was very much a part of the family as much as any person. The house itself had personality. The house itself was sometimes a more dependable personality, because it was always the same. Whereas my parents were totally unpredictable. I didn't know what they were going to do next. So the house was a real character, a good friend. You see it in my paintings a lot, it recurs over and over again. Also when I'm painting other people, whether it's Poe, or Panzram... like with Poe, you'll see the homes are often the one the person is closest to or the one that they died in, but they have a significance. But with Panzram, it was the Minnesota Boys Training School of his childhood, and then Danmoor prison -- two significant homes in his life, and which must have been very significant to him. Even if you're not consciously aware of it, they have an enormous influence over your life. And then the environment, not only the house but its surroundings. For me, the cemetery was the surroundings, and it was a playground, a place that I explored and did all kinds of childhood things, and witnessed what death was. I'd see people being put in the ground... Rituals of strangers being around the graves, lowering a loved one into the ground, and their emotions. So it was a fascination for me.

GATES: Was your grandfather buried there too?

COLEMAN: No, he wasn't buried there, but he was buried in a cemetery nearby. The one that I photographed was actually a different cemetery, not that one. None of the Colemans are actually buried in that cemetery. But that was the one I played in. I could see it out of my bedroom window. So it was always in the background, somehow.

And that big, picture window in the house that overlooks the cemetery ... I used to stare at it from there. When I was a kid, it was like a window sill and I used to kneel down and draw pictures of it, looking out the window. Since it was a low windowsill, and a big picture window, I had to kneel to do it. There was some kind of shelf underneath the windowsill, and that's where I used to keep the crayons and stuff. I'd just pull it out and look out the window, and draw the headstones and the people.

GATES: Was the Coleman family from around there? Had they been there for a while?

COLEMAN: My grandfather was from Brooklyn, which is where I returned to, because now I'm in Brooklyn. But he wanted to get out of the city -- he was a prize fighter. Since he was born in the city, he longed for the country; he desperately wanted to get out of the city. He was raised in an orphanage, even though his father was still alive. His father was a really bad alcoholic and finally the police took him away from his father and they put him back in the orphanage. He was a really good fighter, but he made it work for him. He had control over it. He would not touch alcohol at all. After seeing what his own father had been made into through alcohol, he just wouldn't touch it. He kind of looked down on people who did drink. But at the same time, he ran speakeasys in the Catskill mountains during Prohibition. So it was good enough to make money off of, but it was beneath him. He used ex-prize fighters to be his strong armed men to run these speakeasys. They were guys I'd always see around when I was a kid. When he moved to Connecticut, for him that was his dream, to get away from the city. That's what he always wanted.

GATES: You picture him as a pretty significant ancestor in a couple of the self-portraits I've seen.

COLEMAN: Yeah. He was a very heroic figure to me -- a better male role model than my own father, who was pretty much a failure, and who was an alcoholic. That's why my grandfather was afraid when my mother hooked up with him, and rightly so, too. She had already been married too, so according to the Catholic Church, that was wrong, so that's why they ex-communicated her. I think it's still true, I'm not sure, but I think you can't remarry.

GATES: I thought you could get an annulment, and then get remarried.

COLEMAN: At this time, you were not allowed to remarry. You could get separated, but you were not allowed to remarried if the other person was still alive. This had some kind of weird effect on her too -- she always believed that she was going to burn in hell for eternity because supposedly her Catholic priest told her that! So it stuck in her mind.

GATES: And in your mind, too.

COLEMAN: Yeah, and in my mind, through her. I remember she'd always bring us to church. She wanted to make sure that our souls were safe, even though hers was cursed.

GATES: Whereas you think of her as something of a saint and yourself as something of a damned figure.

COLEMAN: Yeah, right. But it makes sense that the reverse would happen. I remember when she was really afraid -- you'd see the other people going up to get the host during Communion, and she would not be allowed to go up there because she was not allowed to take Jesus into her because she had been kicked out. So she'd just have to sit there and send us up and everybody else would look down on her.

GATES: Like the wafer was going to burn a hole through her tongue --?!

COLEMAN: Yeah, those sorts of thoughts would go through my mind.

GATES: Was your father a practicing Catholic?

COLEMAN: No, he was Protestant. But he would never go to church anyway. He would still be sleeping off the night before.

GATES: So he's probably burning in Hell, too.

COLEMAN: Yeah. I'm sure he's burning in hell. But probably the Catholic Church is what's burning in hell. [laughs] I mean, that's the real evil. Evil is not somebody like my mother. And probably the real evil is not somebody like my father, either, even though that's what I interpreted it as when I was a child. But that's oversimplified. The actuality is that my father was just a pathetic figure. He wasn't an evil person, he was just kind of a loser. Even though he was scary to me, and would go into tirades, he was powerless. He had no power at all, except over little children.

GATES: You've got this horrifying picture of him in The Man of Sorrows, holding a machete. (The Man of Sorrows is a book published by Gates of Heck which you can purchase at our catalog page)

COLEMAN: Right. And look at the painting of my parents in that -- they're horrible monsters, they're like Tibetan gods. And that's because, I can talk about it now, as an adult, and look at them as insignificant, but not to the child. Because to the child, they're gods. They are all-powerful, they are Kali and Shiva.

GATES: I noticed more and more in your recent paintings, there's one direction, which is towards historic figures, literary figures, in portraits. Then there's also an increased specific return to your own historic past, your own personal archeology. You go further and further back into your influences, into what is a precedent for this world you're in. So not only do you go all the way back to Christ, but you go back to your parents.

COLEMAN: Right, which is even further back. [laughter] Yeah, that's interesting. It seems to be connected, related. When you put it that way, I wasn't even consciously aware of it, but I think it's probably true that there's an attempt to figure myself out, to define myself in the universe before the universe disappears -- a desperate attempt. I don't really know, things are so intangible, so chaotic, so mixed up, so scary, and the world is more scary than people know. I mean, the world is really a fuckin' scary place. So in order for me to deal with that, I have to control it, so I have to redefine it, I have to clarify it.

GATES: And incorporate it, like the host -- you just sort of swallow all the horror.

COLEMAN: Yeah. And by that, gain some feeling of power, some feeling of control. Look at any one of these paintings -- like my most recent painting, the Mombooze-o one. At first it seems like it's chaotic, but it's just the opposite -- it's order. It's an attempt to order the chaos, to put it in control, to harness it.

GATES: To touch every little brushstroke of the horror. To caress it, to control it, crack it up.

COLEMAN: Yeah, and to force it to be your friend, to transform it, to metamorphosize it, to embrace it, and thereby dissolve it, make it powerless. The more frightening or painful it is, the more necessary it is to paint. I glorify it at the same time. It might be my worst enemy, but I make it into gods and heroes.

GATES: You spoke about your paintings being a kind of process of archeology, of digging and digging under the surface, and when you take a subject matter that you know you're going to have in your painting, you really examine it and research it, and as you paint, there's this kind of unveiling of all these different surfaces and stories underneath the story, and that certainly the process of self-excavation that's been occurring recently as well, is also kind of a digestive process -- and there's a lot of digestion in your work too! [laughs] It's like you're chewing on it and ingesting it and encapsulating it, controlling it. It's almost like, why do cannibal killers do their killing? Because they incorporate the power and qualities of whatever it is they want in this other person. So recently you've been incorporating your artistic ancestors, literary ones -- Poe, Freud ...

COLEMAN: Right, and personal ones.

GATES: It does seem like the more recent work is much more digging farther and farther back.

COLEMAN: Yeah, because I'm no longer satisfied. I have to keep digging further, because I've alreadyÉ Each time I have to go further. And when I dig farther, it also seems like my fingers move less, if you know what I mean. It requires even more detail, it requires even more minute brushstrokes. To find more information about the characters, also means more information on the surface of the painting. I know there's more there, if I could just find it, if I could just look between these micro-centimeters, I'm sure there will be something I haven't seen yet, and I have to find it.

GATES: Like the subliminal advertising for booze where the ice cubes have secret breasts in it or something.

COLEMAN: Yeah.

GATES: And that was an airbrushing job somebody got, to airbrush those details.

COLEMAN: Yeah. And it's working like that on the surface of the painting, and it's working like that in the subject. Because at the same time I'm painting, I'm researching the subjects -- whether the subject is my parents, or whether it's Poe -- I'll research Poe, or I'll go to my parent's old house and I'll talk to my sister about my parents; I'll look up books on Poe, I'll look up stuff on Baudelaire. So there's all this research going on, so when I start a painting, I don't know what the surface of the thing is going to look like. It's not pre-sketched out. Because the painting itself is a process.

GATES: Yeah, the process that you engage in when you paint is very unusual. Most painters make an overall sketch and know exactly what's going to be happening. But your paintings kind of grow, it multiplies its cells like a cancer from the inside out.

COLEMAN: Exactly. It unravels. I'm pulling it open to see what's under here. Then it tells me the story. So it's being researched as its being done; it's being explored and learned. And once I've filled the entire surface -- and sometimes that changes, sometimes I have to add pieces on because the surface wasn't big enough -- but once it's totally unraveled on the surface of the masonite, then it's told me the story: Here it is. So when I'm doing it, the only things that create the composition, are the structures in me that desire order, that desire sometimes geometric, like the portrait of my parents, the feelings are so intense and so seemingly uncontrollable and overwhelming, that there's this internal order to control it, as I said before, which creates a composition of order, which is, in that case, very precision, geometric divisions or sides.

GATES: Right, the left side is your mother and the right side is your father, and there's this good and evil.

COLEMAN: They are interchangeable. There's this need to anchor it, and that's what creates the composition.

GATES: The painting of your mother and father seems to have a process of building a world, a classificatory system, that in the very process of building it up, starts to break down. There's this kind of order, and also chaos all at once -- it's visible in all of your work... There's this horror of it falling apart, and this need to try and put it back together.

COLEMAN: Right, but it's very desperate. And I guess what I'm trying to do, I could never do. I could never accomplish what's causing me to do this. So that's why I have to keep doing it over and over again.

GATES: There's always another layer underneath the next layer.

COLEMAN: Yeah. I'm attempting the impossible. So no painting is never going to satisfy, and I'll have to do another one, and another one, and another one. I guess it's in the same way that some sort of trauma can cause you to reenact something that didn't work right, that somehow fucked you over, it won't leave your psyche. So you attempt to recreate it on order to make it right. But you can never do it, you can never make it right. So you have to keep doing it over, and over, and over again. But now it's the very act of doing it that's the pride. I can't ever accomplish what I'm after. It's like the explosion is all that matters. The things that inspired it in the beginning are no longer the drive. I just have to keep going and doing it, and doing it, and looking further. I don't think I'll ever be able to accomplish the thing that somehow got it started. Because I think it's to accomplish the impossible. But nevertheless I have to keep going.

FORWARD TO PART TWO