Riverbank, 2019

Joe Coffey  

Joe Coffey was born in 1966 and grew up in Caledon, Ontario, at the time a rural enclave just outside of Toronto where four generations of his family had farmed. His earliest memories are of drawing and painting the people and animals around him. Indeed, that has continued up until the present time.

He is a bit of a magpie as far as the influences that have shaped the direction of his work. As a child Coffey attended his old Catholic church with its strange Neo-Gothic design and its statues, and he found it both captivating and haunting. He has also had a lifelong love of history and the countless stories of the men and women who helped shape it. Current pop culture, news and the varied music that he listens to while painting in his studio--these are just a few things that fire his imagination and makes the process of working a highly engaging experience.

However, it still comes down to being inspired by the subject and objects in his paintings. How or why someone makes him want to paint them is hard to put in words and perhaps need not have any explanation. Coffey would say that in choosing his subjects, he strives to portray a sculptured expressiveness, yet he also likes to fix his subjects in a tension which can either be static, dynamic or, ideally, both. Joe Coffey has a theatre background, in fact as a young man he believed he would become an actor, and so drama still informs his work. He has been an exhibiting artist for the past 20 years: his work hangs in commercial galleries in San Francisco, Toronto, Calgary and Victoria. Joe Coffey's paintings can be found in private and corporate collections in Canada, the United States, France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. HeI now lives and works from his studio in Victoria BC.