Tessa’s artistic education began with the Figurative Painting Diploma from Heatherleys, completed in 2002, after a previous career as a Japanese investment manager in London and Tokyo. After 12 years of independent studio practice, she did a Masters Degree in Fine Art at the New York Academy of Art from 2014-16 whilst living in New York.
Since 2002 Tessa has exhibited widely in exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including the Threadneedle Art Prize, the Lynn Painter Stainers Prize, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the New English Art Club Annual Exhibitions. In 2010 Tessa was elected to membership of the New English Art Club after being awarded the NEAC's Cecil Jospe Prize. She is a member of the New English Art Club Committee, and is active in promoting the Club’s ethos of the importance of drawing in image making to emerging artists and the wider public.
"Drawing is critical to my working process and is how I explore my ideas and develop my compositions. The structural and formal qualities of the image are key. My first degree was in Pure Mathematics, and geometric and colour organization and pattern are pretty deeply rooted in my work. The more relationships, rhymes and patterns I see in an image before starting to paint, the stronger the final work normally is.
My picture ideas come from many sources, but are normally visually led. They often start with a glance that stops me in my tracks based on unexpected shape or colour juxtapositions. Some recent starts have included the unexpected pairing of traffic light and tree set against the distant skyscrapers, shadows of a stag’s skull, rushing figures in the sunlit street. The subject matter can be close at hand and intimate, or vast and distant, in other words lemon, city or both. The vertiginous and unexpected perspectives I experienced whilst doing my Master’s degree in New York a few years ago led to an investigation into perspectival systems and how to deal with spatial issues in new ways in my painting.
I liken the messy and very unscientific process of making 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 whole. The all too elusive goal is for this whole to be read both at a distance and up close, to work as a window and a wall. “ Tessa Coleman 2021