Is he on to something?

From simply viewing Joe Coleman's work and seeing his grim outlook on the world, it's very easy to pin him as 'crazy.'With mangled body parts and flaming backgrounds, anyone would consider him unusual. Yet after seeing "Rest in Pieces," I started to take a new outlook on Coleman as a person. True, he paints controversial works filled with gory images,strange mutations and he does bite the heads off mice. Yet as Joe Coleman himself stated in the documentary, it's better for him to take out his rage in the form of art rather than with a gun or a knife. Sure, there are people he would have liked to kill, but he hasn't murdered anyone, yet. The movie has made me shift my focus off of Joe Coleman's work as an artist and onto him as a person. Although it may not have been the purpose of "Rest in Pieces," I have now become less interested in what his artwork has to say, and more focused on what exactly is the matter or perhaps isn't the matter with this man. It might seem easy to say that Joe Coleman is crazy, but is that truly the case? If he was seriously insane, it is likely he would have channeled his rage in a far different manner than simply painting disturbing images and putting on controversial performances. I started thinking that maybe Joe Coleman is more sane than some of us. After all, he has found a way to successfully focus his emotions into an almost acceptable escape, whereas most of us probably keep our frustrations bottled up, which will end up causing us more grief later on in life. As Coleman's ex-girlfriend explained, he is almost too nice of a person, now how many of us can honestly say that about ourselves? He might seem crazy, but in the end, he's expressing feelings that the average person wouldn't dare release. Maybe we're being too harsh by calling Coleman crazy. Sure, he definitely has some emotional hang-ups and insecurities, but who doesn't? As strange as it sounds to admit this, maybe Joe Coleman is on to something, maybe he's got the right idea.