Ian Chapman

I'm a painter, illustrator, and author based in Masterton, in the heart of the Wairarapa. I've been making work since the 1990s — paintings that tend to sit somewhere between the funny and the unsettling, populated by ordinary people in quietly absurd situations.

My paintings are figurative and bold, with flat colour, strong shapes, and a cast of characters that keep showing up whether I invite them or not. I work across physical and digital media, and my sketchbooks are where most ideas start before they become something else.

I'm a founding member of ConArt Gallery and Studios in Masterton and have served as General Manager of King Street Artworks — a community arts organisation I care about deeply. Staying connected to the local creative community has always mattered to me as much as the work itself.

Over the years I've shown work in solo exhibitions at Aratoi Museum of Art and History and Zimmerman Art Gallery in Palmerston North, with shows including Gravity Sucks, Desperately Normal, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and most recently Creature Comforts (2025). In 2019 I won the Rosewood Premier Award at the Wairarapa Art Review, and in 2023 I was a finalist in The Lester Prize for Portraiture in Perth — one of the bigger portraiture prizes in this part of the world.

In 2025 I published Left to Nowhere with OneTree House — a picture book I wrote and illustrated about creatures who destroy the colourful world around them. It's for kids, mostly. Maybe not entirely.

I also trained in Creative Writing at Whitireia, which probably explains more about my paintings than my paintings do.