Guy Joseph Coheleach, American (1933 – )

Guy Coheleach is one of the world’s most celebrated and accomplished painters of animals and wildlife. His artistic life has been dedicated to capturing the essence of the animal and conveying the intensity of its being, and its aliveness right down to the glint in its eye.

Born in Baldwin, Long Island, Coheleach studied art and graduated from Cooper Union. After graduation, he worked in commercial art doing illustration. It was not until meeting Don Eckelberry, a recipient of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Master Artist award, that he was inspired to follow his dream of making a living painting wildlife. He has since won numerous awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from William and Mary College.

Gathering visual reference for his paintings, he is a frequent traveler to our national parks, Alaska, Europe, South America and Africa, having been to the Dark Continent as much as four times in one year since the late sixties.

In 1972, he was run down by an elephant in Zambia. This hair-raising film has been on all three major networks. “This is exactly that kind of knowledge that has made him one of the best wild animal painters in the world admired by both scientists and art critics,” says Pat Robertson in Sporting Classics.

His donations to worthy causes are limited only by time and availability of work. At the University of Tennessee, his endowment provides about six full scholarships to the School of Wildlife Management for needy Students each year.

Today, Guy Coheleach lives and works in New Jersey, creating oil paintings of wildlife, particularly big cats, of which he is especially fond. Mill Pond Press has published his work since 1990.

Guy has been honored with a number of one-man museum exhibitions, films and books, including The Big Cats: The Paintings of Guy Coheleach (Abrams, 1982); Coheleach (Briar Patch Press 1989); The Best of Wildlife Painting (North Light Books, 1997); and Guy Coheleach’s Animal Art (DDR Publishing, 1994).

Coheleach is a born adventurer who loves to paint. He says, “Given the choice, I could paint predators the rest of my life – tigers, eagles, leopards, dangerous creatures… I love them.”