The Fields

The fields within these paintings range from farm paddocks, typical of rural dominated Mid-Canterbury, to desolate sports fields after hours, to cemeteries – places of mourning and remembrance. These ubiquitous locations are familiar to many, yet the paint in which the artist has re-presented them implies something more unearthly and intangible.

A broader range of colours have been utilised in these new paintings, including conventional opaque oils alongside Coleman’s usual palette of interference paint. It is referred to as ‘interference’ paint due to the way the pigment particles refract light, bouncing it back in unexpected directions. Polarised pigments have also been used throughout these paintings, giving two distinct opposite colours from the same paint depending on viewpoint. Hamish's use of these pigments challenges the notion of paint and painting as static somehow. On their shimmering painted surfaces, a sense of transience is evoked, narratives fragment, and colours escape and reappear with the change of viewing angle.

In some ways, the title given to this exhibition is an intentional misdirection. The observant viewer will notice that fields are not actually present in all of these paintings, nor is this series simply paintings of grass, but rather a collection of moments. Perhaps what these paintings are actually about is the candid instants of ordinary interaction – between people, places, pets. Half grins, animals in motion, daisy chains in the wind; these are all fleeting scenes laboured in paint.

Extracting an unposed, still image from a film and making it last forever in oil paint seems like an odd thing to do, but in 2024, so is painting itself. Often these are in-between frames of non-importance in the context of the hundreds of frames that often come before and after. Yet, when transformed into a painting that takes weeks or months to create, it gains status. That is what painting can be: a means to slow down and make something from a moment. Unlike so many other aspects of modern life, oil painting can’t be rushed. It’s this concern with slowing down that the artist always revisits.

Anyone who lives in a small town needs a car to get around. It's not a matter of simply taking the bus or walking everywhere. Cars are a valuable asset in a non-city dweller's life, so it was a natural decision for Hamish to include a painting depicting the inside of one. Nice Town illuminates things through the windshield, but they’re still not any clearer from the driver’s point of view. By chance, the work sharing the exhibition's title, The Fields, is set just beyond those very same green streetlights of Nice Town, across the road from his old highschool. 

If life is about what you see along the way, the rest stops and not just the destination, then The Fields is a nod to these moments trapped in a painted white lie.