Loring W. Coleman: Living and Painting in a Changing New England, An Autobiography

11 x 12”, 240 pages, Hardcover, 115 color plates.

Written by Loring W. Coleman, NA, AWS; Edited by Hugh Fortmiller with a Foreword by Henry Adams.

Published by Hard Press Editions in association with Hudson Hills Press.

ISBN 13: 978-1-55595-341-6

Loring W. Coleman, one of New England’s leading realists, shares his lifetime of art through a recounting of amusing and intriguing experiences as a student and teacher. Thirty anecdotal essays are featured, showcasing his paintings representative of his work from the 1950s through the early 21st century. These cleverly drawn stories are derived from his own impressions and experiences during the creation of these paintings. Loring W. Coleman touches us in our knowing of a New England landscape and its deep impressions of leaning farmhouses, sagging Colonials with a few shingles missing, and barely-there barns. His style is exact, capturing weight, light and an introspective silence in a moment of vanishing beauty.

 “You have seen Loring Coleman's New England, though you may not have noticed it,” says Louise Kennedy of the Boston Globe. “Look past the strip malls and the busy new suburban developments, with their mass-produced imitations of old Colonial charm. Look past the old Colonial charm, too, past the meticulously restored white clapboard houses around the immaculate village greens. Look, instead, at the swaybacked farmhouse that could use a coat of paint. Notice the old barn with a tar-papered shed tacked on. Find the rusting tractor, veiled by a scrim of weeds. That is the New England that Loring Coleman sees, and it is the New England he has been painting for most of his 84 years.”

Coleman studied with New England notables Hermann Dudley Murphy, Charles Curtis Allen and Bernard Keyes and then went on to teach as Head of the Art Department at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts from 1958 to 1974. His work is part of many public collections. He is induction in 1941 in the Guild of Boston Artists made him the youngest painter ever elected to membership.  His is also a member since 1941 of the Salmagundi Club. He lives with his wife, Katinka, in Harvard, Massachusetts.