Loring Coleman (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Late autumn, the sky was pale-gray, the weather damp, "bone-chilling."

"This is the kind of day when anything can happen," writes artist Loring Coleman in his new memoir. "—the kind of day I love."

Coleman recalls gazing out the window of his van at a familiar barn on Madigan Lane in Harvard, one of a group of buildings he had painted several times before. Coleman painted from his van in the cold seasons, seated on a chair he had sawed the legs down on to avoid having to crane his neck to see out the window.

"And I can remember sitting there watching, looking at this subject and watching it change from rain, to drizzle, to little pepper and salt snow, to snow, watching all these changes take place while I'm looking at it," Coleman said, describing the scene in a recent interview from his home on Poor Farm Road. "And I painted that picture as it looked to me with crusty snow falling, fine little flakes of snow falling, like pepper and salt. A wonderful effect."

The painting, "Spectral Barn," from 1995, is one of his favorites from a career that has spanned over seven decades.

"There's a lot of wonderful stuff in Harvard," he said. "A great town."

From brush to pen

Coleman's autobiography "Loring W. Coleman: Living and Painting in a Changing New England" will be published this month by Hard Press Editions. In the book, over 50 of Coleman's paintings, in full color, share space with biographical and anecdotal essays by Coleman about his life and his paintings.

Coleman, 93, became the youngest painter ever inducted into the Guild of Boston Artists in 1941. He continued his plein air painting of New England landscapes and buildings into his 90s, until a hemorrhage in his right eye forced him to stop. Unable to paint, Coleman took up the pen.

Katinka Coleman listens intently as husband talks about their wedding day.

"When it became aware to me with the problems with my eye that I was never going to be able to paint again, that was a terrible blow," Coleman said. He discovered, though, that, with a bit of difficulty, he could still write.

"So my wife and I talked about this and I said, 'Well, by golly, I'm going to write,'" Coleman said. "There's certainly plenty that I've lived through and I'm going to put it down on paper."

'Rough and tumble'

Coleman did live through plenty. His father owned an iron ore and smelting business in Chicago, where Coleman spent the school year as a boy.

"I got to know Chicago at its best, or worst, however you want to put it," Coleman said. "They say it was the beginning of the Great Depression, and it was a hard time in Chicago."

Depression-era Chicago was a "rough and tumble" city, Coleman said, illustrating his point with an anecdote: a glimpse of Al Capone while back-to-school shopping in a downtown department store.

The gritty Chicago atmosphere of his winters contrasted with Coleman's idyllic summers at his grandfather's 200-acre farm in Concord, Mass. This is where his admiration of New England began, and where he began to paint.

"I painted even as a child, all the scenes I could remember of my childhood life on the farm, and the neighbors' farms: the Brigham's farm, the Wheelers' farm, and so forth," Coleman said.

Coleman points out his painting “Spectral Barn.”

The cover of Coleman’s autobiography. (Courtesy photo)

Eventually, Coleman came to live in New England year-round, studying at the Fessenden School in West Newton before settling in at the Middlesex School in Concord, where he would later, as an adult, head up the art department for 26 years.

He had struggled before in school, due to undiagnosed dyslexia, Coleman writes in his book, and it wasn't until he entered the Middlesex School that, "I felt anyone tried to understand my reading and spelling problems and my creative needs...I began my years there as a terrible student, but I finished with a truly great education."

Coleman and his wife, Katinka, married the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Coleman was drafted into the army and quickly rose through the ranks. He built and commanded the U.S. Army's largest World War II art department. After the war, and a brief time in Decatur, Georgia, designing publications for Emory University, Coleman and his family returned to Massachusetts and he began his 50-year career painting the farms, fields, bridges, and barns of New England.

Out in the open

As a plein air painter, Coleman did almost all of his work outside.

"Everything I painted, with few exceptions, was painted on location," he said. "To me it was important that I be in the presence of the subject. I didn't have to take the subject 100 percent as I saw it; I could make any changes I wanted. But I was there."

In his forward to Coleman's book, art historian and former Middlesex School student Henry Adams describes his old teacher's work: "Although he was trained in landscape and the human figure, to a large extent he moved to become an architectural painter—a painter of old houses and barns. His real subject, however, has not been the architecture itself as much as it has been the way that time and use have touched these structures."

Hence the subtitle of Coleman's book, "Living and Painting in a Changing New England." As barns and farms fell out of use, crumbled, and became overgrown, Coleman was there to capture them. The farm life in New England, as he knew it during his summers in Concord, has become almost non-existent, Coleman said.

"A lot of that was included in the book, this feeling of diminishing land and property and places to farm," he said. "As I said in one paragraph in the book, it won't be long before everything will be urbanized: clean, neat, orderly. The smell of manure and hay and cows is rapidly going. I can see that happening before my eyes."

A crow sculpture above Coleman’s desk holds a paintbrush at the ready.

Coleman's book, then, serves not only as a retrospective of his remarkable and successful career, but, through his words and pictures, as a document of the fading rural character of the region.

Coleman recounts his early-morning routine when he was a teacher at the Middlesex School: "I would leave my house in Concord early in the morning and park the car and there'd be an old field along the way where I used to hunt partridges and pheasant and I'd take my shotgun and I'd walk down through the fields and hunt there for an hour or so before I was due at Middlesex, and I used to get in hunting on my way to school. And I could see that changing. As the barns diminished and farms diminished and as houses went in where barns had been, I could see that taking place, and that was not a change I particularly liked."

Swords, motorcycles, and stories

Loring and Katinka Coleman moved into their home in Harvard in 1963.

"I love this place. I love Harvard, I still do. I think it's a wonderful town," Coleman said. "…I painted a lot of the farms in Harvard, a great many of them, and I love them, because there were farms here at that time. It was a long time ago. A lot of those pictures are included in my book."

Painting is not Coleman's only passion; his studio boasts a collection of Civil War-era swords, and an entire chapter of his book explores his fascination with motorcycles ("…If you are an oil painter and also a motorcyclist, do not strap your gear to your bike and go out sketching."). Coleman has always pursued his interests with vigor and he has done the same with his latest endeavor, as a writer.

"I love to tell stories," Coleman said. "I love to tell stories about myself, and some of them are just hilariously funny and those are the kind of stories I like to tell, because they are so funny. And a lot of those are included in my book, and to me that gives the book some savor, some flavor, some taste."

For more information and to order a book, visit www.loringcoleman.com. A reception will be held at the Powers Gallery in Acton on Dec. 10 from 4 to 6 p.m.

Locally, Coleman's work can be found in the collections at the Acton Town Hall, the Concord Public Library, the Fitchburg Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Sudbury Public Library. His work can also be found at the National Academy and the Salmagundi Club in New York City and is part of the collection of Fidelity Investments and the Ford Motor Company.