Hamish Coleman’s painting explores the interface of the actual and the remembered, blending the genres of landscape and portraiture, abstraction and figuration. 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 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 artist’s signature use of interference oil paint ,which changes colour in response to viewing angle, plays with strange croppings, scale distortions and figures on edges looking in, looking back and also out at us.

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, he had his first public gallery solo exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery.