Geoff Coleman
Geoff Coleman (b. 1952, Melbourne) is a Melbourne based painter whose practice, spanning since 2003, followed an earlier career in art education and publishing. He holds a Diploma of Art and Design from Caulfield Institute of Technology, and has been represented by galleries across Melbourne since 2007.
Coleman composes his paintings from multiple perspective drawings and collaged studies on paper, working through the compositional tension between distance and perspective as he rearranges the interplay of shapes, shadows and pattern across the constructed and natural world. The results are representational, grounded in careful observation, but never quite true to life: a knowing distortion runs beneath the familiar realism, native trees and fauna, the backyard pool, the Hills Hoist, rendered with a persistent, dreamlike unease that fringes on the surreal. Overtly hypnagogic scenes: upright fish sprout from a field of tall grass, human legs stand alone beneath a clothesline, and, at times more quietly felt, an unplaceable strangeness settles over the mundane: a suburban house, a backyard barbecue, a bus by the pool. His paintings gesture toward speculative narratives, quiet, brooding spaces built from a tumble of ordinary things, surveying the social dynamics and psychological undercurrents of identity and place as they play out in everyday, unmistakably Australian settings. As Coleman describes it, composition works "much in the way poetry is composed, by the arrangement of formal elements like words in a poem," with the suburban buildings themselves standing "like actors on a stage," witnesses to "lives lived and lives to be lived." His 2014 Benalla Nude Art Prize entry, The Lightness of Being, turned this same searching attention toward the human body, exploring what he described as "the vulnerability of the human form" and "musings on the psychology of the self and the nature of the human condition."
Coleman was a John Leslie Art Prize finalist for his landscape work (2022, 2024), and has also been a finalist in the Bayside Painting Prize (2022, 2023, 2025), the ANL Maritime Art Prize (2019), the National Capital Art Prize (2022), the Hornsby Art Prize (2026), the Stanthorpe Art Prize (2026) and the Benalla Nude Art Prize, and the 2025 Soho Art Prize. His work has been exhibited at galleries across Victoria, including Gippsland Art Gallery, Bayside Gallery and Benalla Art Gallery, and is held in private collections across Australia.
Geoff Coleman (b. 1952, Melbourne) is a Melbourne based painter whose practice, spanning since 2003, followed an earlier career in art education and publishing. He holds a Diploma of Art and Design from Caulfield Institute of Technology, and has been represented by galleries across Melbourne since 2007.
Coleman composes his paintings from multiple perspective drawings and collaged studies on paper, working through the compositional tension between distance and perspective as he rearranges the interplay of shapes, shadows and pattern across the constructed and natural world. The results are representational, grounded in careful observation, but never quite true to life: a knowing distortion runs beneath the familiar realism, native trees and fauna, the backyard pool, the Hills Hoist, rendered with a persistent, dreamlike unease that fringes on the surreal. Overtly hypnagogic scenes: upright fish sprout from a field of tall grass, human legs stand alone beneath a clothesline, and, at times more quietly felt, an unplaceable strangeness settles over the mundane: a suburban house, a backyard barbecue, a bus by the pool. His paintings gesture toward speculative narratives, quiet, brooding spaces built from a tumble of ordinary things, surveying the social dynamics and psychological undercurrents of identity and place as they play out in everyday, unmistakably Australian settings. As Coleman describes it, composition works "much in the way poetry is composed, by the arrangement of formal elements like words in a poem," with the suburban buildings themselves standing "like actors on a stage," witnesses to "lives lived and lives to be lived." His 2014 Benalla Nude Art Prize entry, The Lightness of Being, turned this same searching attention toward the human body, exploring what he described as "the vulnerability of the human form" and "musings on the psychology of the self and the nature of the human condition."
Coleman was a John Leslie Art Prize finalist for his landscape work (2022, 2024), and has also been a finalist in the Bayside Painting Prize (2022, 2023, 2025), the ANL Maritime Art Prize (2019), the National Capital Art Prize (2022), the Hornsby Art Prize (2026), the Stanthorpe Art Prize (2026) and the Benalla Nude Art Prize, and the 2025 Soho Art Prize. His work has been exhibited at galleries across Victoria, including Gippsland Art Gallery, Bayside Gallery and Benalla Art Gallery, and is held in private collections across Australia.