About The Artist
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Carson Collins
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Biography
I've been working on The Ocean Series for more than a quarter of a century. I guess you could say that this conflation of a traditional marine sunset with a color-field painting, something that originally crossed my mind sometime back in 1978, has turned out to be a fairly fertile idea for me. Call it a Remodernist approach to the color-field tradition if you like, but I'm not trying to deconstruct anything, fit into any category, or prove any theories. The ocean, with its infinite variety and constant flux, is a motif that never ceases to fascinate me and to say that this image of the far horizon and the dying sunlight has broad metaphoric powers would be to belabor the obvious. My two greatest influences as a painter have been Mark Rothko and Claude Monet in a way, my paintings are only a kind of simple-minded formal synthesis of the two. At least, I hope they're that good. Once in a while a commercial gallery will invite me to do an exhibition. My first solo was at Sarah Rentschler Gallery, NYC, in 1980. The most recent one (as of this writing) was January 2003 at Sekanina Contemporary Art Gallery in Ferrara, Italy. I had a good show at Norro Gruppen Konstgallerie, Stockholm, Sweden, in 1991. In between there were about a dozen others, spread out over the past 20 years but seldom in the same place twice... Its been a lonely path. I'm nomadic, never stay in one place for more than a year or two don't have any possessions except for what I can carry on the iron birds. So far I've lived in 7 of the USA States and 6 other countries. I prefer warm places, but anywhere with a left coast will do - for a while. Of course I always have to be near the motif. Yet I don't like painting outdoors. I often work in buildings that have been, for one reason or another, abandoned. I can't seem to paint effectively for more than about 4 hours a day. The rest of the time I mostly spend walking or sitting on the beach, staring at the ocean. I meditate. I surf when I can. I take part-time work when its available have had quite a variety of dead-end, no-brainer jobs, some of which I liked. I've got an MD degree from the University of Texas that I've chosen to ignore. You might also say that I have the equivalent of a PhD in "coping". Looking at a work of art affects us in a positive, a negative, or (rarely) a neutral way. This is obvious: Look at the image, not just a glance, spend some time at it. Notice how you feel. My intention in making them was to create a meditative ambiance: a profound and lucid calm. Enter the illusion. You are the figure that inhabits this eternal place. Notice how you feel. Some viewers have found them evocative.
Statement
I am not a realist. The Ocean Series is a Remodernist response to the color-field paintings of Mark Rothko. These are not paintings of objects. They are not souvenirs of places, and they do not tell stories. They do present a recognizable image, and an illusion of depth. The image consists of the sea, the horizon, and the sky. This is not the real, physical ocean, or atmosphere - it's a symbol. I propose that, as such,it can be universal. The central theme in my painting is the search for stillness, the sort of profound and lucid calm that is the result of meditation or contemplation another main theme is the relationship between humans, the ocean, and the atmosphere. The intent of my work is to create an ambiance where the spiritual dimension of this relationship can be experienced.
Artist History
What did I was just sit and stare at the ocean for thousands of hours plus I surfed and went out on boats every chance I got. But the main thing was to sit and contemplate the ocean, I mean real mystical style contemplation in a trance state. And I made sketches, reams of pencil sketches on newsprint pads with circles and arrows and notes about the way the patterns on the water were formed and changed and the colors.
You or anyone could do the same thing it just requires a sort of monomania that most people don't have or want. I mean I literally spent my entire life for this. But in the end I did manage to produce a few paintings that have the quality of something much loved and long remembered, and that's perhaps what some people see in them.
Signed up on 02/21/2007
Category: Painting
