Mitchell Cheesman
Artist's Statement
Still life is Mitchell Cheesman’s enduring subject. Painting in thick impasto oil, he treats the genre as a structure capable of holding almost anything: landscape, interior, object, place. A wooden table becomes an open field; a candle stands in for a lamppost; a narrow wall reads as a vase. The traditional arrangement of objects is exaggerated and reconfigured until its meaning shifts, familiar things rearranged into forms not seen before.
The work is less a record of what was observed than an impression of it — objects gathered from daily life and recomposed on the canvas according to the artist’s own internal logic and way of seeing the world. Colour and texture carry as much weight as the objects themselves, each surface built up in dense, tactile layers of paint. Underlying this process is a belief in painting as a form of observation akin to poetry: collecting, distilling, and reordering the world rather than simply depicting it.
Biography
Mitchell Cheesman (b. 1999) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Born in Brisbane and raised on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, he is self-taught, working in oil paint to create impasto still life paintings through a process that is intrinsic and emotional, drawing on a wide range of contemporary and historical influences spanning poetry, music, and film. A finalist in The Bentley’s 40 Under 40 Art Exhibition & Art Prize (2021), he has presented numerous solo exhibitions, including Seasons Stain The Vein at The G Contemporary (2025), From My Chair at Curatorial+Co. (2023), Under Stilts at The G Contemporary (2023), and Solitude in Berlin at Curatorial+Co. (2022). His works are held in private collections across Australia, USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and the UK.
