We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michael Collins a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Michael thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
My initial influences and desire to make art occurred in my childhood as I was born into a family of working artists. My father and mother, maternal grandmother, along with my maternal aunt and uncle were all artists making art full-time. They were tremendously supportive of my interest in art as a child. Also in childhood my memories were highlighted by visits at my father’s studio from Marcel Duchamp, Lee Bontecou and Salvador Dali among many others. As I grew from childhood into teen years and beyond I stretched, sized and primed canvases and had experiences in ceramics assisting them in a studio, which was located in our home. These early experiences including drawing the human figure, still life observation and painting in a variety of processes that began my life as a classically trained visual artist. Their encouragement to consider and balance my art with a sensitivity to both process and content has cemented my foundation of the big ideas in life as a thematic energy to all that I create.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
With powerful childhood experiences from my family in our in-home studio, my love of art was magnified by combining my dream state with distinct classical training during childhood that has benefited my oeuvre of art making throughout my life through to today. This appreciation for the significance of the dream state as well as an understanding of the invaluable nature of classical training, lead me to experience a sense of freedom when drawing and painting. This formative environment produced a desire to create paintings laden with conscience and content. Through high school and by college, it was very evident that I held a core desire to create paintings and drawings as a life long activity. I realized I loved the energy held in sharing ideas about classical training and the importance for conscience and content in not only making my own art, but also for teaching visual art on a professional level. That desire lead to a professional career as an art professor all the while burning a creative candle for making my own art on a daily basis.
My art has evolved these many decades into an art form that is essentially ambiguous and might be seen and defined as allegorical or post symbolic. Works that would hang a viewer in a sense of mystery or where the viewers’ subconscious may suggest associations to the conscious mind that the viewer may not have even known or were not evident at an initial viewing of a painting is at the core of my painting efforts. The poet Arthur Rimbaud referred to this sort of art as the art of the indeterminant and connects my art to a long history of artists who are considered grand eccentrics. Through associations stimulated by the art, the viewer concludes their own story when viewing my paintings. Within a broader description my art combines two traditions in art history that are main stays in the past hundred years. First, art about art i.e. modernism where color, texture, line and form etc., through abstraction, reveal deep poetic territory and content messages for the viewer; and secondly by adding the sensibility of art about life and the human condition an openness is found, and a powerful energy emerges from my art.
Considering my contemporary romantic directions a few artists that continue to inspire me and my art are, Francisco José de Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, Peiter Breugel, William M. Turner, Vincent van Gogh, Lovis Corenth, Max Beckman, Charles Burchfield, Philip Guston and the first American symbolist painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder. All of these inspirational artists create vast fields of mystery within their painting and engaged the viewers imagination in ways that enable the painting to communicate more content to their viewers over the greatest period of time.
Several of my greatest art highlights would be my Mid-America Arts Alliance NEA Grant award for excellence in painting and works on paper, along with three individual Artists Awards Grants from the Houston Visual Arts Council for top paintings in Houston and the surrounding areas. Along with these grant awards in the 1990’s other highlights are the over 60 solo exhibitions and more than 50 prizes won in over 280 juried and curated group exhibitions where my art has earned significant attention globally by local, national and international reviews. Another vital area of my creative development is the over 20 museum collections which have included my art in their permanent collections. Finally my first hardbound art publication must be seen as a seminal accomplishment. It was published by Halcyon Press entitled, From Ruins to Resurrection Sacred Landscapes of Michael Roque Collins, which features fine essays by Ken Marvel (owner of LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe N.M. who represents my art in N.M.) Jim Edwards, artist, curator and art writer San Francisco, and Edward Lucie-Smith, internationally renowned art critic and art writer, England.
I enjoy working in a variety of mediums including oil painting, watercolor, painting over black and white photographs, drawing in ink, pencil, charcoal and a variety of mixed media processes. I also have explored a variety of printmaking processes such as etching, lithography and silkscreen. I find all of these creative mediums allow a most helpful Archimedean perspective allowing me to see my painting activities more clearly. Processes that I employ in my paintings that amplify a sense of mystery within my thematic focus are the energies resulting when abstraction and figuration collide, when the mythic and the quotidian are utilized simultaneously and when light emerges from darkness. The process of my painting relates to my body movement and to the texture of surface, both its opacity and translucency. Pigment is applied by brush, knife, hand, scrapping veiling and pooling. The sequences of feeding the surface is completely subject to the energy held in each painting which I am sensitive to as the content evolves. Most ideas begin in a chiaroscuro world as color develops of its own accord. In painting, I follow the currents of thinking, feeling and willing which allows discovery to emerge.
Being a university Distinguished Professor of Art and a Senior Artist in Residence for painting and teaching 48 years all the while creating art as a full time endeavor has been rewarding and a pursuit where one activity has fed another.
As we face this era in our shared history we clearly seem to be situated in a period where antiquarianism is shifting to barbarism. Our current splenic era has been a back drop to my desire to create art that speaks clearly to a terrible beauty that we face and to the energy required to maintain our cultural honesty. I wish for my paintings to rise up to express the continuing role of greatness of humanity in all of its tragic glory where my art is of content and information and is thick and rich with the juices of belief.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
There are a myriad of rewarding components of being an artist and they are all related to discovery while creating and to discovering how viewers and potentially collectors find meaning and joy in viewing and living with the art one creates. Each artist is on a journey of self and cultural discovery and when a balance occurs between what an artists finds and then through their art allows others to also discover through engagement over time all is most rewarding.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Driving my art, as stated previously, are my many dreams and through these the realization that these dreams and memories are enlivened and made more powerful by the creative process. To realize a poetic vision through painting is my mission when making art and that these paintings may provide a poetic connection through the expression of consciousness and content to the times we share in our current splenetic era remains a primary goal of my painting activity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.michaelroquecollins.com
- Instagram: @michaelroquecollins Instagram photos and videos
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/12HGKdTFSC/
- Other: https://www.losnotrequired.com www.https://foltzgallery.com, Michael Roque Collins LewAllengalleries.com, Michael Roque Collins
Image Credits
All photography courtesy of Michael Roque Collins