Michael Coyne’s art exists at the intersection between familiarity and closer inspection, where the world we thought we knew is seen again for the first time.

His paintings and photographs consistently invite us to look deeper into the places we have come to take for granted.

Prof. Coyne earned his bachelor of fine arts degree at Mount Allison University in 1975 and his master’s degree at the University of Regina in 1977.

He joined the faculty at Acadia University in 1978 and later became head of the art department there.

In 1986, he was appointed head of the new visual arts department at what is now known as Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook.

Though trained as a painter and traditional print maker, Prof. Coyne has also created digital and photo-based work for over 30 years now.

He sometimes begins with small photographs and transforms them by hand, enlarging, fragmenting, recombining them, sometimes in grid-like formats, into much larger works of art.

The result feels both intimate and expansive. Every ripple of light on water, every leaf, every shadow a subject, but also a part of a broader vision.

 

Michael Coyne was the first head of the visual arts program at Grenfell Campus. Photo from Memorial University Archives.

 

As head of the Visual Arts Department at Grenfell, Coyne influenced multiple generations of students — students who learned not just techniques, but a sensitivity to place s well.

Under his leadership, the department balanced teaching technical skills with encouraging the risks that lead to originality and personal vision.

Beyond his individual art practice, Coyne’s presence on campus helped root Grenfell’s visual arts program more firmly in the Newfoundland and Labrador tradition of looking outward through local experience.

His work and his teaching helped students see that focusing on the local — a woodland scene, a particular quality of Newfoundland light or a coastal rhythm — is not provincial, but powerful.

Prof. Coyne’s contributions to Grenfell Campus have been both aesthetic and academic. Aesthetic in that his paintings find new resonance in landscapes that have nearly become clichés in art. Academic in the sense that he helped define Grenfell’s visual art program for generations to come.

His art appears in numerous public and private collections across the country, including the Grenfell Art Gallery’s permanent collection in Corner Brook.

His colleagues and former students speak of him as someone who kept the program honest by being committed to craft, grounded in place and open to experimentation.

Through his paintings, his teaching and his role in shaping the Grenfell’s visual arts department, Prof. Coyne has helped Memorial University foster a vision of Newfoundland and Labrador, a vision that asks us to take a second look so we might finally see what is right before our eyes.