Born in Suffolk in 1955, Tessa Newcomb is the daughter of the artist Mary Newcomb. She attended the Norwich School of Art from 1972 and received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Bath Academy of Art in 1976. In 1977 she attended a course on printmaking at the Wimbledon School of Art.
Newcomb’s first solo exhibition was held at the Annexe Gallery, Wimbledon in 1979. She has works in public collections including the Bradford Metropolitan Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery.
The Suffolk countryside and country events feature predominantly in Newcomb’s paintings. She also produced jacket illustrations for Julia Blackburn’s Daisy in the Desert and the paperback edition of The Emperor’s East Island. Tessa Newcomb’s paintings record the world immediately around her, the garden, the greenhouse, the allotment; she draws you into her work, it feels intimate, you could be a local peering over the fence.
“I like painting allotments because they are full of the curiously diverse kind of happenings I usually paint but they are also a focus for an amazing array of abstract shapes, colours and textures.”