Tessa Coleman

Tessa Coleman was born in 1964. After a previous life as a Japanese investment manager, Tessa studied at Heatherley’s, completing their figurative painting diploma in 2001. Since then she has exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Threadneedle Figurative Art Prize, the NEAC Annual Exhibition, the Lynn Painter Stainers Prize and other group exhibitions, winning the Cecil Jospe Prize at the NEAC in 2009.

Both her figure paintings and other work are done from preparatory drawings and direct from life, and the discipline of drawing is key to her work, in order to discover the subject and underpin the composition of a painting.  Particularly in her still lives and architectural paintings, she finds the ostensible subject is less important in itself, but provides the starting point to explore and describe the spatial, geometric, and colour relationships of the image.

She has a particular interest in the interplay of the three dimensional subject with the geometry of the picture plane it is being translated into, and try to bring that quality out in the final image. Tessa’s first degree was in Pure Mathematics and she draws on her classical geometry training when composing a picture.