ASHLEY COLLINS
PAINTING THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SOULS IN THE WORLD.
BLUE CHIP - ASHLEY COLLINS
FIRELIGHT WORKS
We live in a world where images are cropped, adjusted and filtered to perfection.
For Collins, it is the imperfection that reveals the beauty.
What if you created paintings based upon the reflective almost ghost- like images created by the firelights reflection - the blurred abstract capturing the stunning concept of motion.
SKIN HORSE PAINTINGS
In the Skin Horse ["Fractured Perfection"] Paintings, Collins Physically spends months and years creating two paintings on one canvas...
The first is the perfectly imagined figurative horse beautifully layered, and depth filled...
To which she then takes a Hammer and Chisel.... and literally destroys everything...... she then re-assembles and repaints the figurative image anew... but beautifully flawed, like each of us. It is the cracks through which the light enters our lives.
Pieces of Eight - Unshackled
In These Series of Works - Pieces of Eight, instead of beginning with a blank canvas, Collins begins with eight canvases containing portions of a prior works and images, produced with archival ink... Collins then begins the painting, or actually eight paintings -each of which take on a life of their own, as she layers with historical pages, oil, acrylic, and found objects. Only eight in each grouping of works in the world.
FURIOUS ANGELS
“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], 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. 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].
GENERATIONAL PAINTINGS
Collins first became internationally known for her uber-scaled earth toned paintings featuring giant horseheads - layered using papers aged by the elements over years, sun, rain, wind... and historical pages and objects.... something never done before..........The warmth of these paintings somehow enables us to be timeless within our own world, the past and the future colliding. A representation that those that have gone before us and paved the paths are so much a part of us, just as our own actions echo into the lives of future generations. Collins "Generational" Paintings.
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.
Abstract Colorfields
The Sheer Beauty and Exuburance of bookpages, layer upon layer, splashed with paint, and nurished with shading from Collins brush combine to create depth filled amazing abstracts. For Collins each bookpage covering hundreds of years of history, carries with it the soul of those who have touched those actual pages over the generations.
