Artist Bio
Nicola Newman (nee. Chatham) is an Australian contemporary landscape artist living and working on the unceded land of the Juru people of the Birri Gubba nation in North Queensland.
Her paintings explore the reverie of nature, often capturing coastal landscapes through an atmospheric, abstracted lens. Drawing on memory and sensory experience in both new and remembered locales, Newman's work investigates the shifting states experienced outdoors—between dawn and dusk, cold fronts and brewing storms, the liminal moments that make the world feel suspended in changing light.
She creates from her home studio, often in response to sailing trips on her yacht in the Whitsundays and up the east coast of Australia, fully immersed in the environments that inspire her work. This intimate relationship with the sea and coastal landscapes brings an embodied understanding of place that comes from direct, sustained engagement with the natural world.
Known for juxtaposing atmospheric abstracted landscapes with titles taken directly from her personal diaries, Newman bridges external and internal landscapes. Her work connects what she witnesses in nature with her interior experience, exploring the dichotomy of presence and distraction, idealised travel and day-to-day reality—inspired by light as it filters through morning mist, glances off water, or saturates the sky at dusk, and by the ever-changing moods of the Australian coast.
Working both from memory and on location, she pushes and blends paint to capture not literal representations, but the felt sense of being present in a moment. Her paintings invite viewers to experience the essence of place rather than its exact likeness, evoking the meditative quality of standing at the edge of the sea, watching the day shift into night, or feeling a storm gather on the horizon.
Newman holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (2005) and has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2002. Her work is held in public collections including Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery and private collections across Australia and internationally.
Artist Statement
My practice centres on a paradox I've explored for over two decades: we can stand before the most beautiful, awe-inspiring landscape—watching storm clouds roll across the ocean, noticing patterns in tree bark, observing the light shift across water—yet our minds often occupy themselves with concerns about the future or memories from the past. We're somewhere other than where we are.
Since 2008, I've incorporated excerpts from my personal diaries as titles for my paintings, making visible the gap between where our bodies are and where our attention travels. These fragments—day-to-day trivia, neurotic musings, observations—present a more honest acknowledgment of how we actually experience place, particularly when trauma, neurodivergence, or nervous system dysregulation pull our attention away from the present moment.
The titles of my paintings are taken directly from my personal diaries—fragments of thought, observation, and daily life that juxtapose against atmospheric images of islands, horizons, and shifting light. This pairing makes visible something we rarely acknowledge: that our experience of place is inseparable from our psychological landscape, our preoccupations, our attempt to be present while our minds pull us elsewhere.
As for my painting process, I'm drawn to a specific moment in oil paint's drying—when it becomes tacky and offers resistance—allowing me to push the paint with force, creating edges where atmospheric forms merge and dissolve. I work in series, and these paintings hover between abstraction and representation, exploring liminal moments: dawn and dusk, approaching storms, the quality of light as it shifts across the water.
As a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman, I'm particularly interested in the conditions that allow for deep creative presence. Nature offers me a space for regulation and sustained attention that social environments often don't. Through painting, I investigate these moments of genuine connection with the external world, while acknowledging how rare and precious—and fragmented—they can be.
PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY
Nicola Newman (née Chatham) (b. 1982, Victoria) is a contemporary Australian artist whose practice explores the relationship between interior experience and the natural world through painting, printmaking, and writing.
Living and working on the unceded land of the Juru people of the Birri Gubba Nation in North Queensland, Newman's practice has been fundamentally shaped by a lifelong relationship with sailing Australia's east coast—first as a child, then living aboard for three years full-time in her late thirties. She gained her Bachelor of Fine Art from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (2005), and prior to that, a Diploma of Visual Art from Southbank Institute of TAFE.
Since her first solo exhibition, Townsville to Tasmania: Coastal Impressions (2002), Newman has exhibited across Australia and internationally. Her work is characterised by an investigation of landscape as psychological space. Since 2008, she has incorporated excerpts from personal diaries as painting titles, making visible the gap between where our bodies are and where our attention travels—creating tension between the visual experience of nature and the reality of our wandering interior worlds.
Solo exhibitions include Beyond the Horizon, Art Piece Gallery, NSW (2013); It Was a Strangely Happy Day, Anita Traverso Gallery, Melbourne (2011); My Morning Ritual, Caloundra Regional Gallery (2011); Between Here and There, Logan Art Gallery (2010); Cohuna Diaries, Anita Traverso Gallery, Melbourne (2009); With or Without Drought You, Redland Art Gallery (2009); and Over the Garden Fence, Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery (2008).
Her practice also includes wood engraving, watercolour, and writing, with recent book arts projects including illustrating poetry collections You Will Find Your Way and Nature Told Me a Secret for poet Naomi Arnold, and authoring The Seasonal Journal for Creative Hearts.
Newman received the Overall Winner’s Award in Umbrella Studio’s Member’s Exhibition (2026), the Espresso Garage Award in the Thiess Art Prize (2006) and has been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Stan + Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize (2007), Redland Art Awards (2006, 2016), Artworkers Award (2006), Churchie Emerging Art Award (2006), and City of Albany Art Prize (2016). She was awarded an Arts Queensland Presentation and Development Grant (2008). International exhibitions include the Örebro International Video Art Festival, Sweden (2008).
Her work is held in public collections including Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery and Royal Brisbane & Women's Hospital, corporate collections including Lendlease, The Star, and Metlink, and private collections in Australia, England, the United States, and New Zealand. The State Library of Queensland and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts have published catalogue essays written by Newman.
Beyond her studio practice, Newman works with creative practitioners exploring what it takes to sustain an art practice when conventional structures don't fit. She hosts creative retreats on tropical islands and mentors artists through online programs. Earlier in her career, she co-directed Moreton Street Spare Room Projects (M.S.S.R.), an artist-run initiative that received a $50,000 Arts Queensland grant to produce a three-part documentary series featuring contemporary Australian artists including Tony Albert, Eleanor and James Avery, and Rebecca Ross. She has been featured in Profile Magazine, Australian Country, and GQ Australia, and interviewed on podcasts including Why Not Art, in-Between, and Mojo Radio Show.
Newman is currently developing work for a joint exhibition with Dr. Paula Payne, exploring themes of water, voyage, attention, and memory—marking a full-circle moment 25 years after Payne first taught her to paint.