Philip Clairmont was celebrated from the late 1970s as perhaps New Zealand's leading figurative colourist and neo-expressionist. He was born in Nelson in 1949, studied at Ilam in Christchurch under Rudolf Gopas and lived and worked in Auckland alongside Tony Fomison and Allen Maddox during his short career, before committing suicide at the age of 34.

He was inspired by the spatial intensities of interiors; obsessed by the theatrical drama of artificial light; and his paintings sought out, as he said, the essence of objects and their suggestive properties. Alongside such objects as chairs, staircases and fireplaces, and though Clairmont generally shunned the human figure, he returned again and again to the self-portrait. ...