About the Artist
Stu Coleman has been a commercial artist since the early 1980s when the medium was xerography and dry-transfer lettering and the message was underground band posters. In the late 80s, he was the Art-Director and Editor of the Duckberg Times, a Washington D.C. music and arts paper. Throughout the 1990s, he worked in entertainment advertising, retouching movie posters and creating mechanicals and began painting in acrylics to decorate his home and those of his Hollywood friends. After a period of working as a SAG actor and music producer, he returned to commercial art.
Through the 2000s, he continued working in movie advertising, and furthered his love affair with beaches of the U.S. and Caribbean. He took up sailing and scuba diving and continued to paint abstract landscapes of the places that had moved him.
In 2009, he spent 2 months living in Utila, a quaint Bay Island of Honduras, earning his PADI Scuba Instructor Certification. He also spent 19 days helping deliver a 50′ racing sailboat from Hawaii to Long Beach, sailed for three months as Mate/Master Gunner aboard the squared rigged tall ship, Hawaiian Chieftain in the Puget Sound and from October 2009 through 2010, worked as a Scuba Instructor/Dive Boat Captain in St. Thomas, USVI.
After earning his MBA from Loyola Marymount University in December 2012, he returned to creating digital and print movie advertising campaigns for Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, Peacock, HBO, CBS and just about every other content creator in Hollywood.
Coleman lived in Marina del Rey, CA through 2025 and conducted sailing charters, lessons, races and cruises aboard his Beneteau 331, Reliance.
Now semi-retired from the entertainment industry, He paints from his home La Quinta, CA.
Coleman”s pro-bono illustrations for the Catalina Conservancy Avalon Harbor Underwater Clean-Up were elected as the winning design for three years in a row.
Stu Coleman’s painting “Studio” in Marina Del Rey, CA
Painting Methodology
The majority of these paintings were painted “en plein air” on the balconies or decks of Marina del Rey artist’s Stu Coleman’s “pied-à-mers” in California from 2002-2025.
Earlier Paintings were painted in the Capra-Cohn Cottage in the Hollywood Dell neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills
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Stu Coleman also runs Cooldaddy Media, a company focused on Music and Art.