Furious Angels Paintings

With “Furious Angels”, Collins takes her wildly successful “Skin Horse” series to a different dimension.

“Why?”  Collins ask, “are Angels depicted throughout history as these cupid-like floating entities with no exterior strength…. wouldn’t Angels, to truly be able to alter lives, to change our historical course….to in no small part [save us], need furious power and focus unmatched?”…. Collins continues “Often we ourselves help others through small acts of kindness… but to overcome powerful obstacles in aid for others, it is only though sacrifice and strength, that we truly change lives… and rise up with Wings fiercely spread in Fury.”

It is this fury and power that Collins brings to this new series, doubling down with massive texture and LED Neon.         But rather than being over the top, Collins somehow manages to incorporate these disparate parts into something hauntingly beautiful.    Wings break the third wall while her assemblages and layers within the figurative horse are reminders of her friend Robert Rauschenberg [who in Collins most difficult times, provided encouragement when others said the horse as a subject matter could not be contemporary art].

In these works, the layers are created, the figurative horse painted… and then Collins takes chisel, hammer and sander and literally destroys the work.   Then Collins creates from the destruction, like a Phoenix, a new entity full of power.  Like our own lives, the scars from this battle create another layer of growth, making something perfect in its imperfection.

Furious Angels, are not only that which we aspire to become, but that which has been within us all along, seeking to be awakened.

CLOUD PAINTINGS

Clouds, are a constantly changing mirror of our own lives.   Collins begins each canvas of her Cloud Paintings with layers of historical pages, intentionally crumpled and repeatedly layered until a wholly unique texture is created.... but this texture is not canvas wide, but rather placed in select areas... forming one of three textures..... pure white.... pure cloud.... and historical pages sanded to create an otherworldly aged surface.  Collins then constructs out of paint some of the most difficult images, as the canvas texture, fights against the brush and against logic.  What is created is a floating simplicity, that is anything but.

PIECES OF EIGHT

For Collins multi media Pieces of Eight Constructs, she begins by taking a digital image of one of her significant works, then adding Historical Documents, Letters, all digitally created and then printed on fresh canvas using archival museum quality ink.  From this initial canvas, she then creates Eight completely different paintings... each venturing far from the underlying first canvas layer.  The name comes from the famed Spanish Silver Coin, the first in the world to be minted with consistent quality of metal and weight in 1497, which quickly became the international currency around the world for hundreds of years...its duration and value so relied upon, that it was even required as payment during the American Revolution some 300 years later.  Collins only paints eight of each grouping.