Exhibition Archive 2010 - Present
The Width of Yourself
Solomon Fine Art, Balfe Street, Dublin 2, Ireland |
February 6th – 29th 2020
Each of Eamon Colman’s paintings is a new conversation. One between the particular possibilities open to a painter and the almost unlimited material available through a genuinely open approach to engaging with place. A conversation that draws on both the corporeal memory of his walking body and a lively curiosity about just where that body finds itself in the contingent world at any given time. Whether quick or slow, that conversation is enacted physically in the studio but only concluded when Colman has pondered what he’s made and found the evocative words that become a title. (An imaginative act in its own right informed by his deep engagement with poetry, particularly contemporary Irish poetry). Read full exhibition essay by Dr. Iain Biggs, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Dundee in the Exhibition Catalogue here >.
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Double Vision, The Kilkenny Arts Festival 2019
The Old Dore Factory, Abbey Street, Kilkenny |
August 10th – 18th, 2019, Opening Hours 10.30am – 5.30pm
This exhibition brings together two radically different Kilkenny-based artists for a double ‘portrait’ of the county. While Blaise Smith creates portraits and landscapes that record everyday life with breathtaking precision, Eamon Colman blends the figurative and the abstract, capturing shifting weather patterns and the experience of walking the terrain. For this brand-new project, both artists have spent time painting ‘landscapes’ in and around Kilkenny. The result is a fascinating exhibition that offers two startlingly fresh visions of the city, and the county, as seen through the eyes of two of Ireland’s most respected artists.
For Further Information:
Kilkenny Arts Week Website
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Thaw
Oriel Queen's Hall Gallery | Wales |
2018
Stemming from Eamon Colman’s consideration of the rural uplands of northeast County Kilkenny, in the south-east of Ireland, a place 900 ft. above sea level - above the snowline where he lives, this new series of paintings meditates on the weather and its effects on how we conceive and perceive landscape. Thaw acts as a metaphor for what is both concealed and revealed, a conceptual tool creating an elusive interplay between figuration and abstraction. Colman explores this in-between-ness through both large and very small scale works on paper, using acrylic, gouache and watercolour he employs techniques of layering and gluing, tearing back and scratching into to articulate both myopic and hyperoptic fields of vision.
Supported by
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Thinking-in-movement
Stern Studio Gallery, Vienna |
February/March 2017
With generous support from Culture Ireland
Walking slowly is not a measure or matter of speed, it creates a space for hesitation which produces new modes of relating. The pace at which Colman walks asks questions about what might happen if we could learn with the world, rather than about it.
Thinking-in-movement infers that we become open to stimuli we cannot fully represent. This then fuels his imagination and is translated through paint - colour, shape, line and composition.
Throughout art history, the horizon line in landscape painting has been explored traditionally, delineating the sky from the land, adding perspective and depth onto a two-dimensional substrate. Whilst this representation is translated in paint, and from three dimensions to two dimensions, it is but an illusion. The theme running through this new body of work encompasses Colman's fascination with the horizon line and his interest in how this can be reimagined through different modes of seeing and experiencing nature.
Supported by
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Walking at three miles an hour
Hillsboro Fine art | Dublin |
2015
Walking at Three Miles Per Hour is the title of a new series of paintings by Eamon Colman at Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin. The new work for this exhibition was inspired by the act of walking and the average speed of a person undertaking a long walk. The narrative the artist evokes is closely bound up with the act of walking; life viewed as a journey.
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Scattered Showers
Triskel Art Centre | Cork |
2013
The exhibition Scattered Showers by Eamon Colman at Triskel Christchurch , Cork brings together new work that is centrallyconcerned with the exploration of different form.s of weather. The starting point is the experienced weather felt by the artist from his rural home, located 900 ft up a hill in County Kilkenny.
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There is no season for margins
Hillsboro Fine Art | Dublin |
2012
Colman is a walker, adopting the approach of the anthropologist and ethnographer in his quest for being at one, bringing himself into relation with nature. He gives voice to an encounter, portraying subjects such as snoring owls, apple trees, snow, rain, memory and time and to that which bares the trace of human significance, as an imprint of a culture through his use of paint and colour. The paintings in this exhibition in oil on linen are built up and out from the regularity of the straight edge, without a frame referencing the said finitude. The human condition may attempt to adjust nature at the edges with boundaries, ploughed fields and plantations, but our reaction to nature if directed acknowledges that nature is uncontained, without an external frame, reaching infinity.
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Monument
Stern Studio | Vienna, Austria |
2011
Adopting an ethnographic approach this series of 24 paintings, on un-stretched linen, conflate forgotten histories with a contemporary sense of belonging. These visualise an experienced and fictional landscape; the particularity of the locale is embedded in cultural beliefs and thus reflected in this series. Monument is a characterisation of something physical, a shrine that is fluid, a space and subjective place for navigating potentiality of the local narratives of identity, history, politics and economy together emphasising a unique and particular position.
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What is real or actual? Everything and nothing
Oriel Queen's Hall Gallery | Wales |
2010
From his ongoing research Colman has turned his philosophies to the subject of landscape, in particular – the question that surround the depictions of landscape. Questions about mood, does the mood of the artist effect how the landscape is addressed? Does the landscape have a mood?
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Before the dark gets stronger than the light
Rua Red, South Dublin Arts Centre | Dublin |
November 2010
Before the dark gets stronger than the light is a new body of paintings by Eamon Colman. Rendered in acrylic and oil paint on Somerset 410 gram paper these large-scale paintings depict abstracted, experienced landscapes.
Influenced by the writings of German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, Colman explores the question that surround the “depictions of landscape”- the real or the actual. Questions about mood, does the mood of the artist affect how the landscape is addressed? Does the landscape have a mood? Deemed as “unmistakably a colourist” by Aidan Dunne, for Colman the introduction of colour as an indicator of mood allows the viewer to interpret this for themselves. The artist is not the end controller but part of the visual debate.
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