Charles Colman grew up in Sydney, and has moved around the world since, ending up in Melbourne where he currently lives.

His career was in music, as a conductor and secondary teacher, but he also had a love of painting and studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in 1983.

While living in Italy teaching English for 3 years during the mid 1990s, his desire to paint was rekindled as he absorbed the beautiful scenes there. With his mother’s watercolour paint box in his backpack, he started painting again with renewed passion.

On returning to Brisbane, Australia in 1999, the next 15 years of his life was a busy mix of English and music teaching, conducting, running a B&B and painting.

During this period he studied with several prominent artists, including Ev Hales and Michelle Retschlag, and exhibited with the Queensland Watercolour Society, The Half Dozen Group, and in a successful duo exhibition with his niece, Sally Colman, in Brisbane.

A short summary of his lifelong music career starts with his graduation in 1956 from Sydney University, with Honours in Music, soon afterwards continuing his studies in London, Munich and Siena.

He began his Australian music career by taking over an established chamber choir, The Leonine Consort, and developing it into the leading vocal chamber ensemble in Australia. In 1978 he hand-picked 8 singers to help him refine the Consort into a full-time, fully professional group, which was a leader in the field. Their concerts often included an elite chamber orchestra. The vocal ensemble performed in all the eastern capitals, as well as throughout S.E. Asia. In 1984 he founded and directed The Song Company, another versatile and technically brilliant ensemble that can still be heard in concert halls in Australia and abroad.

Now resident in Melbourne, Charles continues to paint his favourite subjects: the mountains, rivers, trees, forests and seascapes of Australia. His paintings hang in private collections in Australia, Europe and America.