Part Two of Five

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GATES: Do you know in advance what your next painting is going to be? Do you discover while you're doing one painting, what you feel the next painting needs to be?

COLEMAN: Sometimes. But sometimes I don't know.

GATES: You've done paintings that you sort of discover their subject matter along the way.

COLEMAN: Yeah.
GATES: And then there are some which are specifically about one person. Like the Freud painting, versus, say, the Divine Comedy painting. That kind of developed its theme as you were painting it.

COLEMAN: Exactly. I didn't know the theme when I began. It just turned into this band, this international subterranean band flying into our backyard.

GATES: That painting was incredible. Johnny Depp owns that one?

COLEMAN: No, Johnny Depp owns the Celine one. (shown here)

GATES: So technically speaking, how many hours a day do you paint? How many days can you stand to paint?

COLEMAN: I paint eight hours a day for five days a week, I guess like a normal job. That's what it's like. It requires the discipline. So that means even if I take a break, I still have to put in those hours later.

GATES: Purgatory.
COLEMAN: Yeah, it's like purgatory. But that's because that's what the process is. The process is a rite of passage; you have to earn it. You have to do painstaking detail, it's necessary. I guess I'm so Catholic that I'm saying some sort of redemption, but it's true. It's the only way you can bring life to the thing. You have to earn it. To me, the modern art that has to do with concept, cleverness, is a soulless, empty art form, because it hasn't earned its life. Dr. Frankenstein would have to work hard to create that life. It would take him dedication and a faith to stay with the thing until it has breathed and has been given life. You have to earn that through your patience, through your pain and through your dedication to your faith in the subject coming together, and this painting coming together. You can't do it just by collage -- cutting out somebody else's images and pasting them down. Because that person, like a Max Ernst, who does collage, you're taking away that person who put the work in. You're taking what he earned by putting his work in. So you're actually taking from your own soul. So by the end, you have nothing. You're soulless.
GATES: Well there is something in some of Max Ernst collage work that relates to yours in the sense that, like the rubbing work he did, he would find these patterns, and would work them up afterwards. He'd find details and then free-associate what he saw in these patterns, and he'd develop these worlds and universes within them. Kind of a Surrealistic free-association that happens in some of your background work.

COLEMAN: Yeah, that's true. I'm being awfully critical to make a point. It's not important for me to judge Max Ernst, and there are some things of his that I like, and I like a lot of his paintings too. I'm just trying to make a point with what I'm saying. The fact that, in order to breathe life into the subject, it requires your patience. Patience is a virtue. In this world right now, people don't have time for anything anymore. They want it now. They don't want to work for it. They don't want to give it its due. And if you don't, then the thing is made to fall. It's doomed to not stand up, it's not going to stand the test of time.

GATES: I think about how Dr. Frankenstein patched his man out of pieces that he found all over the place, and sewed them together, and made all the pieces fit. There is a certain kind of collage aspect with what he did. But there is a very big difference in the question of labor.
COLEMAN: Yeah, and I don't really mean to put down collage, I was just trying to come up with an example. It's necessary to say that, you go to a yuppie restaurant, and they give you a small portion of everything, and you pay more money to get less. In the art world, they'll sell these paintings that took a couple of hours for the artist to do, but that makes it better. Somehow, less is more. But any child would look at that plate which has little, tiny portions, and say, "Hey come on! You're ripping me off! Where's the rest of my food!" Or look at a painting that took an hour and then see another one that took a real amount of time, a really dedicated piece, and the child would know which one was better. Because the child is reacting without any of the bullshit. You're taught what's sophisticated. You're taught what to believe.
You're taught to believe it's sophisticated to like these small portions. You suppress your real desire, and your real feelings about the subject, and you say, "Oh yes, I like it like this." But the fool knows more than you do, because the fool is not influenced by this conception of sophistication. The fool says, "I didn't get enough food!" And it's true for art too. That you don't get enough food for the eye and for the soul. And much of modern art, the cleverness, like Madison Avenue. That certain clever quality in the work is as far as it goes, and no farther than that. And you're told, that in order to be sophisticated, that's what you'll like. So you can come up with all the rhetoric to define why you like this, but what do you really feel? Do you understand what you really feel about the thing? To a large percentage, people don't know what they feel. They are told what to feel and think, and if they don't think those things, that's bad taste.

GATES: You function definitely on the fringes of the art world. It's interesting that Raw Vision magazine, a magazine devoted totally to outsider art, or non-schooled art, would be interested in doing an article on you, and that you in fact are interested in the artwork of the insane -- an outsider art -- which often has this kind of horror quality like your work, that they have to put everything into their painting, there's this kind of explosive presence of the artist in the work.

COLEMAN: That's the stuff I can relate to and understand. Because that's the stuff where the feelings are everything, where the person is everything, the artist that makes it, it's all about him. If it was in the Who's Who In High Art, they would call them indulgent pieces because they're all about the artist who makes it, and that's all they're concerned with. They're not concerned with trends, or with sales in the art world or making a sophisticated statement in our history. They're not. They're desperate. They're desperate to put these things down on paper. I might be projecting, but this is what I believe. That they need to do this, it's part of survival, it's part of breathing air, it's eating, it's sex.

GATES: And it's that way for you too: You need to do this.

COLEMAN: Yes.

GATES: You've spoken about it like if you weren't doing this, you'd be out killing people. It's not therapy, butÉ

COLEMAN: It's like eating or sleeping. It's necessary for existence. So it's all emotion. In sophisticated art, it's the lack of emotion that makes it sophisticated. It's taking that out of the subject. Another example is Lichtenstein. He'll take a comic book panel and rob it of its emotional quality, and make it big, and essentially castrate it. Now, suddenly, it's High Art.

GATES: Right. High Art has, all the time, stolen things from so-called low art, and by removing it from its context and making it big, and making it seem universal, and talking about the big themes, well now it's high art. Whereas this connection to its origin, to its context, to the place it was made, to who made it, that's one of the qualities of outsider art, and one of the qualities of your work, as well.
COLEMAN: Yeah. The place where it had its power was when it was a little comic panel. Because at that point it was still genuine. The emotion, even if it was a True Romance comic, even if it was kind of crudely done, at least it was honest. It was trying for this thing. But it's really conceited to them to rob that. The only thing that ever gave it meaning at all was the sincerity of it. And to just take that right out and blow it up big, and have this presumptuous idea that now this is high art, is insulting.

GATES: There's a sort of pose that high art takes. The irony or sarcasm in high art has to do with feeling superior to the sources. Whereas "outsider art" is absolutely sincere in wanting to know more and more and more about them. Rather than the reverse direction that a lot of high art takes to so-called popular or low art sources as one of just mentioning the bit for the whole.
COLEMAN: It's an insult. It betrays it into something that's for the country club, for the bourgeoisie. It's a way of keeping the upper class upper, and the lower class down.

GATES: It's keeping it secret. It's speaking such a rarefied language, that only a certain number of people can understand.

COLEMAN: Yeah. "We'll only let you in this club if you like the things we like and only if you look down on everybody else, like we do." It's not like that with most of art history. With art history, of art from the past, not modern art but the really old art, it's respected for other reasons, for its dedication, for its sincerity, for its craftsmanship. For these things that really have value. You'll find today people -- it happens in the comics world too, like sophisticated comics -- where the person intentionally draws bad. And that doesn't make any sense to me. When I see a drawing that's done by a janitor or something, that's sincere, the guy is trying to make the picture as best he can, there's a beauty and a charm to that. There's a charm when the intent is there and the person is not trying to bad, they're trying to draw the best that he possible can. He can create these interesting ways of drawing that are unique to that person, and what gives him a certain style.

GATES: He may be trying to draw as much like something he's seen drawn before.

COLEMAN: And his inabilities are what create his own unique style (see Coleman's Portrait of outsider artist Adolf Wolfli, below) And that's very charming. I like that a lot. But when somebody intentionally tries to draw bad, and says, "That's my style," that's insult. That's not the same thing. I try hard to paint the best I can and there are certain things I have difficulty with, like perspective, and it's probably because I have difficulty with perspective in my life. I can't see things in perspective; I only see the details, I miss the whole in my life. So it makes little things seem over-important to me. But that's reflecting in my work.
GATES: And little things are fraught with meaning with interconnections.

COLEMAN: Yeah. But I'm trying as hard as I can to do these things. But for somebody to just do it badly and say, "This is my cool style"--

GATES: Well they're trying to look like they're naive.

COLEMAN: Yeah, and you can't.

GATES: But the real naive artist is trying to look as good as he can! [laughs] I mean, what a scam!
COLEMAN: Yeah. And that points out this conceited attitude that somehow the naive artist is a bad artist. If you do it like that, then you're making him look bad. But he's not a bad artist. He may not be technically not able to draw certain things, the may have some difficulties, but he's not a bad artist. It happens with movies. They call Ed Wood the world's worst movie director. But he's not a bad movie director; he's unique. He has his own vision. And there are certain things he has difficulty with technically. But his vision is very original, and his style is very original. But he gets called a "bad" moviemaker. But Grandma Moses is not a bad painting. There is a certain charm in the fact that there are certain childlike aspects in her paintings. But she's not trying to make it childlike, that's just the way she is.

GATES: That's her vision.

COLEMAN: Yeah. And that's her power. And that's where it has its value. Ed Wood was sincere.

GATES: So what's your idea about comics? You were doing a lot more comics before. It was something you were doing before you came to painting.
COLEMAN: Well actually I didn't come to it before painting, but I was doing more comics from the late-'70s to about 1982, when Mr. Wolverine Woobait was published. That was my first comic book novel, but it wasn't the first comic I'd ever done. I was doing portfolio drawings, Cosmic Retribution, Some Place of Nowhere, I'd done a lot of those drawings.

GATES: Complex street scenes with lots of figures in them.

COLEMAN: Yeah, whorehouses, things like that. And I showed them to Will Eisner. One thing he said is that I shouldn't draw penises. [laughter]

GATES: What was his reason for that? Because you wouldn't get them published, or...

COLEMAN: I think it was just offensive to him. I think it was something personal to him because it came out in such a weird way. [laughs] Like somehow it disturbed him. But anyway, there was something about it -- not the penises!-- that he liked.
GATES: When was this?

COLEMAN: '75, or '76.

GATES: Were you thinking of yourself as wanting to be a comics artist at that point?

COLEMAN: I did like comics, I always like Creepy magazine when I was a kid and all the old ECs, they were great, and the Sunday comics when I was real little were pretty good. I liked Dick Tracy. So there was always something about comics that I liked. These days the Sunday comics are pretty god-awful.

GATES: Did you collect comics when you were a kid?
COLEMAN: Yeah, I think I still have a bunch of Creepy magazines, and Blazing Combat I liked. I liked Sgt. Rock.

GATES: What about Weird War?

COLEMAN: Yeah, I liked that and Weird Westerns too. And Jonah Hex was fascinating, I could always identify with a deformed character. [laughs]

GATES: And he was such a tortured soul. He wanted to do good. But sometimes he just couldn't.

COLEMAN: Yeah, there was a real funny one where they had his death and he ended up in a side show, and his corpse was stuffed.

GATES: Great!

COLEMAN: Yeah, that tradition I'm fascinated by.
GATES: So comics told stories where there was a sort of moralistic thing, the horror aspect of it was kind of a primal one.

COLEMAN: Yeah. They were often little morality plays. I liked the fact that Creepy and Blazing Combat were in black and white, too. It added to the moral dilemma.

GATES: Most of your comics were in black and white. There is some color stuffÉ

COLEMAN: Yeah, my comics were almost all black and white. But my most recent comics work is probably closer to, the one I can think of is Hal Foster, who resembles in the way that its done, but Hal Foster did Prince Valiant and he always did it without any word balloons; the pictures were separate from the words. That's the way most of my recent comics were done; the text was always underneath, no word balloons. There was something about that old fashioned style that I liked and that seemed to work with period pieces, like Panzram or Jack Black or Boxcar Bertha.
GATES: That makes it possible to get a lot more completion in the image and detail in the background because the word balloons would take up that space. Each of the panels in Boxcar Bertha or the Panzram, is a complete seed. It has to tell a whole section of the story rather than a page of separate panels would have done if you were doing it in a more traditional comics form.

COLEMAN: Right. And there's something about its resemblance to old comics like Hal Foster, that gives it a feeling of an earlier period.

GATES: It makes me think, actually of Brueghel.

COLEMAN: Yeah, actually a lot of it goes back a lot farther.

GATES: They would make series of prints, like Goya made a whole series of prints of these scenes, complex stuff that was supposed to tell a section of this idea of the world, the episode. And they weren't conceived in series.
COLEMAN: Yeah, and it actually goes back that far. It goes back to Holbein's woodcuts, the Dance of DeathÉ That's the tradition that it follows.

GATES: That may be the tradition that comics comes from as well. You're borrowing back farther. There are contemporary comic artists who you feel a connection to.

COLEMAN: Yeah. And that direction is very different from the Mr. Wolverine Woobait which pushes the other direction, where the words invade. They'll swirl around somebody's head or cut across panels or surround the whole page, so it goes in a complete opposite direction, where the words are intentionally invasive and are intruding constantly and disrupting everything. Even in a normal comic, there is an attempt to keep word balloons in some kind of neat corner --

GATES: So you know what order you're supposed to read them in.

COLEMAN: Whereas in Woobait they just crash through constantly and disrupt everything.
GATES: There's a very different sense of time in your work. I was thinking in terms of Wolverine Woobait how in each panel though there is a progression through the book of a story, each panel also contains within it lots of other things that refer to other things that have happened.

COLEMAN: That's true. In Woobait there are several stories going on simultaneously that there's information about in a panel. The foreground may be telling one story, and in the background, it's continuing this other story that's been going on, so there are several different storylines that keep progressing throughout it.

GATES: And there are complexities in time in terms of flashbacks or ways in which time passes that are unusual. You're not following any traditional rules of continuity.
COLEMAN: Yeah. Woobait is like a painted glass that's splintered into a million different pieces, and it's following all the different pieces. Some things are happening simultaneously, and some things have happened before. The progression is sometimes hard to figure out at first. You have to go through several pages to start to get its rhythm. But then once you get that, then it starts to pull together and you figure it out. But it's very complex, there's so much going on at the same time.

GATES: You could just follow the borders through the whole book and read it over and over again!

COLEMAN: Right.

GATES: Was there somebody you were looking at at that time who had done that? Or was this just self-generated out of your own mind?

COLEMAN: It's pretty much self-generated, but certainly there are influences. Complex comics artists: Will Elder, S. Clay Wilson, Wally Wood's early stuff. But I think the idea behind what I was trying to do was this desperate need to get all this information out, an explosion of information. Because this is like an explosion. I was fascinated by the look of each at that time. Technically I had some difficulties, but the things I was after were these pages -- sometimes the center of the page would be ripped open and you'd see underneath the page. So the page as a whole was existing, rather than just worrying about the particular panel that I was working on. I was working on specifics, just trying to explore every possibility. It was like an adventure, and I was seeing where it would lead me.

GATES: You self-published that?

COLEMAN: Yeah. Nobody else seemed to be too interested. [snickers] Nobody else seemed to be behind it and I wanted to get it done, so I did it myself.

GATES: Is that a limited edition?

COLEMAN: I guess so. I think there were 2,000.

FORWARD TO PART THREE
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