melanie coleman, born 1964

melanie coleman

Melanie Coleman is committed to landscape as a subject and to realism as a mode. The work in this show takes on new challenges: painting rain, where the whole face of the painting is diffused to a soft gauze, which she has patiently blended with a gilding brush. Painting the moment where the sun’s rays strike the centre of a subject, so that she is blinded, and must paint what she cannot see; resisting the temptation to put in what she knows is there. Painting a subject that made her feel uncomfortable: a bend in a river, overhung thickly with trees, the weed on the surface thickening as the eye moves into the painting. When we stand and look at a Coleman, we are not just seeing the grass, the water, a line of trees along a low horizon, a pale expanse of sky. We are seeing her experience of that space, her conscious surrender to the reality of that moment in that place. This is what art is for: confronting the self through looking into the world; feeling it, facing it, sincerely and without judgement. Then coming to paint it with commitment, truth and care, and expecting no pity.

Lindsey Shaw-Miller

January 2008

Previous Shows:

• melanie coleman: summer show 2005