Hamish Coleman

Hamish Coleman’s painting explores the interface of the actual and the remembered, blending the genres of landscape and portraiture, abstraction and figuration.

The artist’s signature use of interference oil paint, which changes colour in response to viewing angle, challenges the notion of paint and painting as static. On shimmering and textured surfaces, a sense of the elusive is evoked as image, narrative fragment and colour, slip and shift, escape and reappear with the slightest change of viewing angle. Transience itself presents as his subject.

Coleman’s starting point is often found film footage or video he has shot himself. Screen shots grab the fleeting moment generating stills which are then rendered in paint, and seemingly remobilised in paint in iridescent hues. The distinctive paint plays with strange croppings, scale distortions and figures on edges looking in, looking back and also out at us.

The practice of taking Imagery from screen shots of self-shot video footage is a process Coleman enjoys: There’s a certain thrill in capturing a split-second image from a film and spending weeks or months rendering it in paint. I call these screen captures ‘non-images’, and they are what I’m searching for. It’s as if the figure, land and trees were caught off guard, or as if I were a second too slow in capturing a posed scene found through a conventional photograph.

Coleman also has a drawing practice which runs alongside the painting. A recent suite of drawings saw works on paper freed from the confines of the artist’s sketchpad and beautifully stitched onto velvet and mounted in stained oak frames. The result is an intriguing combination: a tease of the tension between an artist’s preparatory processes and a finished artwork; a play with light and dark; slightness and subtance.

Coleman graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) from the Ilam School of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury, in 2012. He has exhibited throughout New Zealand and has work in private and public collections. In 2021, Coleman had had his first public gallery solo exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery.