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ANDY COLLINS |
American painter Andy Collins had his first solo show in New York City in 1999 after art dealer Massimo Audiello had seen some of the artist’s student work. Now five years later, Andy Collins’ meticulously painted abstractions continue to mesmerize viewers with their weirdly suggestive shapes, delicate color schemes, and pristine surfaces. It takes Collins several months to complete a painting, as he works entirely by hand, often applying as many as thirty layers of paint to a single canvas. The pale, washed-out colors he favors and the subtle variations of texture he creates, from glossy to smooth, draw attention to these painstakingly hand-painted surfaces.
In this painting, overlapping and intertwined shapes in pale yellow, green, and pink are accented and outlined by darker linear elements that sinuously snake in and around these lighter areas. Although abstract, Collins’ imagery suggests a myriad of associations, from body parts and undulating landscape forms to fragments of plants or fashion photographs from which he sometimes sketches. In such studies, Collins focuses on subtle details of flesh and fabric – the folds and gaps in clothing that reveal the skin beneath. He transforms the seduction implicit in these details into abstract imagery that often suggests sexuality without depicting it. Yet Collins’ biomorphic abstractions transcend any specific visual sources by extending associations in all directions from the biological to the geological, the microscopic to the macroscopic. This imagery, coupled with the richness of the surfaces created through the artist’s deft handling of his chosen medium, result in paintings that both seduce the eye and engage the mind.
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects