"Joel Coplin’s large, well-populated and well-painted scenes use their sense of art history as a kind of root from which the art grows. If there is a Veronese Wedding at Cana underneath his Pelea de Gallos, or a Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa under his Life Boat, the paintings, to be understood, do not require that knowledge. That knowledge enriches the work, but it is not the point of the work.  

Coplin’s paintings are cultural conundra, congregations of society’s “types” playing out obscure dramas in the proscenium of the canvas. In The King Drinks, it almost looks like The Village People doing tableaux."
Review by Richard Nilsen of the Arizona Republic