Jack Coughlin (artist)

Infobox Artist
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name = Jack Coughlin


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birthdate = Birth date and age|1932|2|19
location = Greenwich, Connecticut
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nationality = Irish-American
field = Painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture
training = Rhode Island School of Design
Art Students League of New York
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awards = awd
award = Dessie Greer Prize [www.nationalacademy.org/press/PR-awards2007.pdf]
year = 2007
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name = National Academy

Jack Coughlin is an artist of Irish-American heritage who is best known for his portraits of literary figures and musicians. As a figurative artist and member of the National Academy of Design, Coughlin’s work is in many prominent collections including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington D.C., the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences in Virginia, the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, the University of Colorado, the Philadelphia Free Public Library, Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfort, Germany, and the New University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Born February 19, 1932 in Greenwich, Connecticut he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students League, New York. Although Coughlin’s education coincided with the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, he has always been drawn to figurative traditions in European and American art.

Art

Coughlin's portraits are regularly commissioned for "the New Republic" magazine [ [http://www.tnr.com/about/masthead.html THE NEW REPUBLIC | Masthead ] ] and have been published in several volumes of poetry in Ireland and the United States.Fact|date=May 2008 However, in prints and drawings from the 1960s to the present, he has also pursued a vein of imagery that is much less naturalistic and that explores a range of sources, from the anatomical drawings of George Stubbs to the grotesque hybrids of European printmakers like Francisco Goya and Martin Schongauer. In many metamorphic, dream like images, absurd and mysterious juxtapositions of the human and animal join in an irrational evolutionary journey. Here his automatic drawing practice is akin to that of the Surrealists and is wed to his interests in the existential wordplay of Samuel Beckett.

Teaching career

Celebrated for his combinations of innovative and traditional techniques during the resurgence of intaglio, lithograph, and woodcut printmaking in the 1960s and 70s, Coughlin taught printmaking at University of Massachusetts Amherst from the foundation of its art department until his retirement over 35 years later. In 2005 Coughlin received the Gladys E. Cook prize at the 2005 annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design.Fact|date=May 2008

References