Artist
Marion Coffey
Milwaukee 1924 — 2011 Milwaukee
Marion Coffey learned how to paint because she knew how to see—and understood what she saw. From her early career as a commercial illustrator in Chicago, she moved to the fine arts and spent a lifetime successfully merging a rich domestic life in Milwaukee with a quiet and unflagging professional dedication to her art. The more she saw on her travels and her museum experiences, the more she mastered, assimilating the lessons of Abstract Expressionism and the great colorists of Europe and America. Her renderings of places, occasionally figures, and especially floral still lifes are riotous celebrations of color and the sheer joy of painting.