Tessa Coleman NEAC

Statement

Tessa’s work is about finding the visual interest in the world around her. Her picture ideas come from many sources, but are normally visually led. They usually start with a glance that stops her in her tracks, often based on unexpected shape or colour juxtapositions. Some recent starts have included the unexpected pairing of traffic light and tree set against the distant skyscrapers, shadows of a stag’s skull, rushing figures in the sunlit street. The subject matter can be close at hand and intimate, or vast and distant, in other words lemon, city or both. The vertiginous and unexpected perspectives Tessa has experienced whilst living in New York for the last two years has led to an investigation into perspectival systems and how to deal with spatial issues in new ways in her painting. 

Methodology

Drawing is critical to Tessa’s working process and is how she explores her ideas and develops her compositions. The structural and formal qualities of the image are key. Her first degree was in pure mathematics, and geometric organization and pattern are pretty deep rooted in her work. The more relationships, rhymes and patterns she sees in an image before starting to paint the stronger the final work normally is. 

She likens the messy and very unscientific process of beginning a painting to sculpting in shape and colour, constantly adjusting  and fine tuning until the image comes together and the parts add up to a cohesive and well structured whole. The all too elusive goal is for this whole to be bold and decisive, subtle, arresting, read at a distance and up close, work as a window and a wall. 

Bio

1964  Born in Hampshire

2002  Figurative Painting Diploma from Heatherleys following a Pure Mathematics Degree from Exeter University in 1985, and a previous career as a Japanese Fund Manager in London and Tokyo

2010  Elected to membership of the New English Art Club

2014  Moved to New York to do a Masters in Fine Art at the New York Academy of Art

Exhibitions

2015   David Zwirner Friends Seminary Art Exhibition

2015   Sothebys New York Take Home A Nude Exhibition

2014   Russell Gallery Summer and Winter Shows

2014   Moorwood Art Summer and Winter Shows, London and Somerset

2013   Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition

2013   Jenna Burlingham Fine Art

2013   Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize

2013   Still Alive, Twenty Still Life Painters at the Mall Galleries

2012   Russell Gallery Summer and Winter Shows

2012    Moncreiffe Bray Autumn Show

2009   Josie Eastwood Fine Art Summer Exhibition

2009   Lynn Painter Stainers Art Prize

2008   The Threadneedle Art Prize, Mall Galleries