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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... flawlessly created to exact detail.

 

Collins then takes a hammer and chisel.... and literally destroys everything...... she then creates the second painting by re-assembling and repainting the figurative image anew... but beautifully flawed, like each of us.  It is the cracks through which the light enters our lives.

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The name "Skin Horse" is an homage to the 1922 Children's book by Margery Williams, which breaks down the barriers between that which adults perceive real, and that which becomes real through the love of a child's eyes.

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For Collins, it is children who see reality, who see the beauty in defects, and the magic in the single stroke of a brush, the excitement of the color red.... and it is our challenge as adults to erase the layers acquired over time which cover the truths we knew, and still in our hearts know.

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