Tessa Coleman NEAC

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.