Born in Oklahoma, visual artist Kevin Coffee lives and works in Colorado. Kevin focused on ceramics as a medium of personal expression for most of nine years and now finds himself drawn to working in new areas, primarily painting and mixed media.

"I've never stayed with any one art medium for very long, but ceramics hooked me for a number of years. For a variety of reasons, I have not had this outlet for a couple of years now, and have been expressing through other means: learning to paint, and play guitar, and playing with the huge collections of toys, mongo, glitter and paint that fill my studio.

"For most of my life, I've been resistant to labeling myself as any one type of artist or person. Life changes too much. But I became pretty attached to the label 'potter', and when I wasn't one anymore, it instituted some pretty serious identity searching.

"Through this process, I came to understand my true medium of expression:
collections. The studio itself, the lifelong collections (from seashells to bottletops, from Hot Wheels cars to alley trash), all the bodies of artwork in all the various media: in this collection lies the true picture of the artist. It is the grouping and juxtapositioning that excite me. I feel overwhelmed sometimes by the details of life, the minutae of life, so I collect it, group it, organize it, frame it in a box.

"And this is why I have had trouble through the years describing myself as an artist, a writer, an actor, a photographer. I'm all these things and more, and life is a continual process of growth, discovery, and revelation."

Kevin's ceramic workemploys a wide range of firing techniques, from primitive cow dung and saw dust pit-fires to the ultra-modern kosai vapor-glaze process. He enjoys exploring the fractal nature of physical reality, the repetition and inter-connectedness of forms in time and space.

While Kevin’s work springs from a conceptual point of inspiration, he seeks to provide a visceral, tactile, non-verbal experience for his audience. He says, “My goal as an artist is to produce beauty, to reflect back to life that which I feel life to be.”

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