The MICA Gallery in Old Town is honoring Lansing artist Kathleen Coe, who died last September.
The retrospective show featured at least 60 of her pieces, according to Jack Bergeron, the curator who worked on the show.
“She had told her husband that she was not interested in trying to make any money off her work,” Bergeron said. “She was painting strictly to paint for her own enjoyment and education.”
Her passion for art and desire to learn goes back more than 30 years. Coe spent her working yeas as an employee for the state government but after retiring she became a fiber artist, with her own studio in the area.
“Someone [fiber artist] who does weavings, makes their own yarn usually. They work in fiber of all different kinds to make weavings and quilts,” Bergeron said. “Fiber’s like the medium of the art.”
While Coe had been doing fiber art before she began to work with canvases she managed to sometimes incorporate weaving with her paintings.
“She used to do weaving and she would have colored areas in her weaving,” Meade-Turnbull, a former art teacher, said. “She transferred that to her paintings.”
Even though none of her fiber art is in this show, her acrylic paintings are, with many of them being figure paintings, but with a twist.
According to Meade-Turnbull Coe intentionally did not try to capture flesh tones, often going through phases of colors, many of which made her paintings extremely unique to others in the classroom.
“She would draw the figure in a very simplistic way so that it was the shape and proceeded to paint it,” Meade-Turnbell said.
One time Coe even brought in an already prepared canvas, painted yellow, to go along with the purple paint cans that she also brought to class. This was going to be a part of a series of complementary colors, Meade-Turnbell said.
Since Coe did used a variety of colors in her figure paintings Bergeron arranged her work based on their color harmonies, including warm and cool colors.
To further her education about art Coe took many art classes at Lansing Community College, where she was quite witty in the classroom.
“She didn’t tell jokes or anything like that but any little thing that came up she would just turn it around to make something funny out of it,” Margaret Meade-Turnbull, a former art teacher, said. “She was just a very witty person. I’d say ‘How’d you ever think of that Kathleen?’ and she didn’t know, it just came out.”
While Coe loved art she had a wide variety of interests. She gained both bachelors and masters degrees and became an ordained minister when she was in her 80s.
