Artist Details

Eamon Colman

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Where gray becomes a liquid gem

 

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Eamon Colman is one of Ireland's most popular and critically-acclaimed
contemporary painters, the subject of a recent book from Gandon Press in
their PROFILES series on Irish artists.

Born in Dublin in 1957, is the son of a well-known artist, Seanus O’Colmain,
he now lives and works in County Kilkenny. He has had numerous solo
exhibitions in Ireland, including at the Gallagher gallery in the Royal
Hibernian Academy in Dublin, and also in Wales, France and Denmark. He’s
been a regular exhibitor at the RHA since 1991. His work has featured in
group shows in Ireland, Italy, London, Barcelona, Hong Kong and Belgium.

Colman is represented in leading collections, including those of the Arts
Council, AIB, Bank of Ireland, Citibank, Danish Arts Council, Deutsche Bank,
Gordon Lambert Collection, Office of Public Works, Royal Victoria Hospital
in Belfast, and the Smurfit, corporate and private.

He was chairperson of the Artists’ Association of Ireland from 1993-95, and
President of European Council of Artists, 1995 – 2000.

Eamon Colman draws much of his inspiration from the natural world. His
sense of place seems to invite comparison with the Irish notion of
dinnseanchas, literally ‘topography’ but often including layers of meaning,
not least from people and happenings: the idea of place “as a line of time
as well as space”, as Simon Schama put it in his book Landscape and Memory.

As Colman told the art critic Brian McAvera in the Irish Arts Review
(Spring 2007), “For me, landscape painting is the starting point of an
exploration of both a personal and a historical response to place. . . I
find that when I look at a cottage in a landscape, the contradiction is
between how romantic it is – and the reality that it has.”

The writer Dermot Healy comments in the Gandon book, Colman “brings a
little of what is outside in, and a little of what is inside out.”

The Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne writes, “As a painter, Eamon Colman
is unmistakably a colourist. Not only because colour – often strong, bright
colour – is a major constituent in terms of the formal pictorial
construction of his compositions, but also because he expects the qualities
inherent in colour to do a substantial part of the emotional work he sees an
integral to the painting process. . . [But he’s not just a colourist] .. in
fact, he consistently uses the classical components of painterly language –
line, colour, tone and form – to which one might add a pronounced leaning
towards pattern.”

Dunne also speaks of the idea of place in relation to Colman’s work – “The
land becomes known to us, Tuan says, largely through stories, stories
relayed in various cultural forms. Practically any landscape, for those who
know it, is dense with meaning, local knowledge built incrementallyover
large stretches of time.”

Colman is a walker, and not just around Kilkenny – he has walled in places
all over the world. Some of his comments from that Irish Arts Review feature
–

“I take myself, with my western views, go to a place, and try to discover
the humanity – the connection between the two cultures. . . [ . . ] That
tied with the philosophy that I have that the earth is a living being like
you or I, it has the same moods and feelings – not in a romantic but in a
realistic way. It’s an organism that breathes and communicates.”

“ . . I believe that my job is to try and find the trueness of nature, or
the truth behind man’s manipulation of nature.”

“I believe that all true art comes from what you know, rather than that from
what you see and think you know. That’s why I’m a landscape painter. If you
were to be wide-eyed in Ireland, the thing that affects you most is the
landscape.”

“When I, as an artist, talk of my work, the main struggle is the balance
between shape, form and colour, and although I’m known as a colourist, it’s
the combination of the three that have to work in harmony, otherwise it is
imbalanced.”

“I want to feel that a painting has a structure; I’m not allowing the
landscape to control my mark-making or me. That’s where the process of
understanding comes from: the struggle to say something about a place
without referring to the obvious in a landscape. So symbols come into the
work as a way of articulating my relationship to the landscape.”