Statement
Coleman Artist Statement 2020
The purpose of art is to express beyond words what life is about: beauty and pain. One morning, long ago, I was grief-stricken from the early and sudden death of my father. I felt aimless. I didn’t know what to do and didn’t feel like doing anything, so I headed outside to sit in the shade by the roses. I was looking at a tired old rose, and I felt old and tired too, even though I had just turned seventeen. My world and everything in it felt gray and lifeless. As I looked and looked at that old rose, my perception subtly shifted. Instead of just an old flower, I saw light filtering through the petals, turning them luminescent and brilliant. I was captivated by the pattern of shadows. I noticed other things, too. I saw the shapes of the spaces between leaves, the contours and edges of the rose. It was full of sparkling, shimmering, vibrating color. As I looked and saw different qualities of the rose, it felt like the walls separating us came tumbling down, and there was freedom. Everything was beautiful, intensively alive, and peaceful. Beauty with a capital “B”. My pain had been transformed by Beauty. In fact, the depths of my grief had probably expanded my capacity to experience Beauty. I don’t really know how to express this experience in words; I felt empty of myself, my personality—but completely full and connected to everything I saw. I was paying attention to the world, and the rose, in a way I had never done before.
So why do I paint? I’ve found that seeking the answers to visual questions brings me into the state of paying profound attention, with the result of experiencing greater awareness of the present moment. Painting is an expressive, emotional and (paradoxically) nonverbal language. Painting is the language of relationships—the interplay of light and shadow, color, value, movement. Painting teaches me to see; seeing teaches me how to paint. It is a lifelong lesson to respond to the world with curiosity, not automaticity. I’ve learned nothing can be viewed in isolation, but rather is in constant relationship to its environment. For example, a muted blue can appear intense relative to the grays around it. Seeing with artist’s eyes is the art of un-labeling. In painting, a cup is not a “cup”. A “cup” can be an exquisite interplay of shape, form, patterns of light, shadow, color and emotion. Something as simple as a cup has its own truth, and the role as an artist is to render that truth. This is also the reason I teach painting and drawing—to help shift the perspective of my students to see true Beauty, and nourish it in their work. Because once you realize Beauty is beneath the surface of all things—as that old rose did for me when I was seventeen— it changes you. And the practice of art is to ask the right questions as you work, questions that allow you to slip beneath the surface of what we find mundane, and see what you never expected.