Gail's Garden (with Dragonfly) #11

STATEMENT
My paintings are often called abstractions, they are not. They are the non-objective landscapes of my inner being, my attempt to move into a greater reality. Bodidharma, the bringer of Zen to China from India said, "Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation."

BIOGRAPHY
Terrence Coffman has diverse artistic talents. Coffman is an accomplished artist, author, musician/songwriter, and an internationally recognized leader in art education. He studied at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was the recipient of two Ford Foundation grants that helped forge his studies at the two schools.
He has received citations from U.S. Senator Herbert Kohl and Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson for his dedication to the visual arts and education in Wisconsin. In 1995, President Clinton invited Coffman to the White House to attend the prestigious National Medal of Arts awards ceremony. That same year, he was awarded a fellowship at the Lacoste School of Art in France were he taught and conducted research for his novel on Vincent van Gogh. In 2001 Terrence Coffman received the Frank Kirkpatrick Award from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and he is the 2008 recipient of the Laird Art Leadership Award from the Melvin Laird Foundation in Washington DC.
Coffman's work has received several awards and has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions.
As a singer/songwriter, he has performed at nightclubs and music venues in Wisconsin, Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C. He has recorded three albums of traditional and contemporary acoustic songs. His most recent CD entitled Songs from Center Avenue Studio is a collection of original songs about family, outlaws, lovers and a dog named Blue.
Coffman is also the author of a fictional novel entitled, A Walk Through the Wheatfields, The Missing Journals of Vincent van Gogh, based on the life of the Post-Impressionist painter. Vantage Press published the novel in December of 2002.