Mitchell Cheesman
Artist's Statement
The still life subject has and always will be my main focus as an artist, purely for me because it covers every ground possible.
It can be exaggerated to extents that can change its traditional appearance, meaning & feeling into an array of objects like you’ve never seen them arranged before.
To me, every painting that i’ve ever done has been a still life, it doesn’t matter if it’s a landscape, restaurant interior, book shelf or water fountain, I find the still life subject in everything. A wooden table top could become an open field, a melted
candle as a lamppost or a narrow brick wall as a burnt orange vase.
Poet’s are collectors, observers and pourers of the world,
And i’m a poet of paint.
Biography
Mitchell Cheesman is a Queensland-based artist who works with oil paint to create stunning, vivacious, impasto paintings of still life scenes. Growing up, Mitchell was always told off in school for drawing instead of working, and at the age of 18 decided to start making art seriously. Self-taught, Mitchell’s process and intrinsic and emotional. He draws inspiration from a wide range of contemporary and historical practices, from poetry, music and film.
Of his second body of work, Stolen Flowers from Strangers Gardens, Mitchell says: “It is an honest project of pure observations and ideas I had made while painting this series. Using textured oil techniques brings the still life works back to life, however displayed in a child-like formation, which may sometimes come across as very abstract and expressive. It’s difficult to know what you are truly observing.”
Mitchell lives, paints and writes poetry from his home on the beautiful Sunshine Coast, Queensland.
