Nicole Collins - Writing

There is a room, around 12 by 20 feet, 15-foot ceilings, well-worn hardwood floors. Four hanging receptacles house fluorescent lighting but I never turn them on; the 2 south facing windows provide just enough light. Three doors connect it to 3 different hallways. One door has a removable wooden panel; perhaps it once acted as an information window, now closed.

The room is painted a very pale tint of celery green.
But once it was a rich deep cerulean blue.

When I first encountered this room, I used it to mount a small exhibition of my paintings for a critique. In several places, the pale green paint had cracked and lifted, revealing the vibrant blue-stained plaster beyond the surface.

Over decades, moisture has seeped from the rooftop, downwards, between plaster and lathe and flooring, following any available opening, making its way to the east wall of this room.

After the critique, I peeled away the most obvious loose curls of paint, revealing dagger-like shapes of brilliant blue, like sky through tree. I became aware that the whole surface, from baseboard to ceiling was covered with cracks. So I found the highest ladder in the building, a metal scraper and some goggles and set to picking off all the loose paint. Only the paint that was easily dislodged was removed; overly vigorous scraping would remove too much of the delicate tracery being revealed.

Surface tension results in a very consistent patterning. This looks like mud flats, river beds, wrinkle patterns in skin, mysterious text, mathematical equations.

This work is a collaboration between the architecture, the passage of time, water, gravity, the painters, the paint, and me.

Postscript: in the days following the “completion” of the work, it was very warm and humid…and the paint began to lift at the edges of the peeled areas. This is ongoing, and theoretically it will only end when all of the topcoat is removed or yet another skin of paint is added: transient intransigence.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Early in my painting practice I was tormented by the self-imposed expectation that every painting be a masterpiece, the work that moves painting forward historically, that stands for life, the universe and everything. My way of coping with this unwieldy pressure was to remove the referential image, the tyranny of the narrative, and focus on the paint. I became a collaborator with the wax and pigment used in encaustic painting.

In 2004 I began to teach a course in historical painting technique at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Much to my surprise I fell head over heels for egg tempera, a process as distant from encaustic (at least the way I use it) as possible. I encouraged the students to use the tried and true method of copying to grasp the basic tendencies of the paint. Wanting to explore the medium further for myself, I looked about for something to copy and landed on my own encaustic paintings.

See origin of incident: incinerate, origin of incident: aggregate and origin of incident: order
all 2005
all diptychs: left panel encaustic, right panel egg tempera, both 8”x8”

Chardin often made copies of his own work for his clients or himself, Elaine Sturtevant copied other artists’ work. I copied my own paintings in a different medium to learn about a new/old kind of paint. I began to see the diptychs as a return to representation, as subject and portrait with the rather strange condition that the subject was also on display. The relationship between the two has an eerie quality of similarity and difference, and it takes a moment to distinguish what exactly is going on. In this case the encaustic panel is definitely the chicken to the egg.

So my thinking turned to this thought: what if I made the same painting over and over in the same medium? Or rather what if I made the same painting many times simultaneously?

All 16 paintings (4 in each of four sizes) came up simultaneously, colour by colour, mark by mark. Using a grid and a series of mylar reference sheets, a specific set of 16 colours, appropriately scaled brushes and regular rotations of the canvas’, the paintings were executed on 17 days.

I find a very satisfying relationship to music in that the individual paintings are like distinct performances of the same song by the same singer; recognition is strong but each rendition contains its own peculiarities.

Since beginning this work I have stumbled over several examples of painters trying to replicate/repeat/copy their own marks. Rauschenberg made Factum I and II in 1957; Ryman, in 1964 made Back Talk: 5 canvas' with the same marks, but, being hand made, with inevitable variations. I feel in good company.

one.16 will be exhibited at Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto in October of 2006.
In the meantime I am working up another song.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stroke for stroke, the title loosely applied to my recent body of work, refers to the system I have used to produce multiple groupings of simultaneously generated paintings.

A series of simple rules were used to establish size, scale, location of marks, predetermined palette etc. Though each canvas looks strangely similar, none are “copies”. They have been painted together, colour by colour, mark by mark. There is no first painting. The aim is to discover and depict a pre-existing order and to make its construction, its parts, visible through the codes of painting.

“shifting loci series”
locus: 1. a place 2. the set of all points that satisfy specified conditions

From Night Book July 11 3am
Paintings that are as inevitable as death and life.
The immediacy of wax
Specific conditions are chosen to create an arena, a space in which I can’t fail
Every mark counts
There are no mistakes
A drip is as important as any other mark
No scraping in this work
Even when I have scraped (in the past) it is not to “correct” but as an act of mark making
Stripe is a distillation of the brushmark
Continuity
Blessed repetition reflects the condition/reality of life (daily rituals & banal activities)
Chroma is all around us
Here it is amplified through pigment & chromatic order
16 colours represent “everything” for me so far at this moment
accumulative
some are straight from the tube and reflect both the world of art and the studio
others are mixed to reflect something of the physical world
some are elemental: black is made of charcoal powder, burnt wood, consumed matter, absence of light
they are applied from highest value to lowest: the covering up (burying?) of light
the experience of making the paintings is a microcosmic re-enactment of a life
energy flares and recedes into darkness but a residue is still visible of the blazing glory
I am still sentimental enough to want to retain a vestige of the glorious moment

Nicole Collins
2006

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statement: 2005

Duplicate

Diptychs 8”x8” each panel plus frames, encaustic/egg tempera:
Origin of Incident: incinerate
Origin of Incident: aggregate
Origin of Incident: order

diptych 8”x8” each panel, encaustic:

stroke for stroke

In these works I am indulging my love for observational painting. The act of looking and making corresponding marks is challenging and ultimately deeply satisfying. Not being interested in the pictorial, I turned to my encaustic paintings for source material.
These are real paintings of real paintings.

I discovered and began to teach (at exactly the same time) egg tempera in the Fall of 2004. The process requires a slow and painstaking application of small translucent brush marks, one over the other until the required colour saturation is achieved. Encaustic can involve a similar approach, however in these works the paint has been applied in thicker, more opaque layers and then carved through in some places, creating a low relief surface. The egg tempera versions are completely flat. They map out a chromatic approximation of the event that is the encaustic painting, the original incident. These works differ from straightforward observational painting in that they include the source. All of my errors and miscalculations are laid on display. Imagine, honesty in painting, that most duplicitous of arts.

In stroke for stroke I took another approach. One panel was painted in a forthright and intuitive manner while specific notes were taken at each action:

Multiple broad stripes: left to right
-layer 1: nickel yellow/orange/pery. Crimson/cad red/nickel yel/gold baroque red/caput mortem
-layer 2: cover interstices l-r: g-red/cad yel dp/p crimson/or/cad red/cap mort outside edges: left-cad yel light right: nick yel

and so on. The notes were then used to re-create the original event resulting in a similar but ultimately different painting. No two moments are alike. I actually need to be reminded of that. I am currently working on larger scale versions of this approach.

It seems to be an analysis of the creative act. Will observation inhibit the act? Or will this voyeurism/appropriation into my own process lead to a deeper understanding of what exactly it is I am doing when I make the paintings?

What is original?
Which painting came first?
Now that I have opened this door I find myself unable to turn away.
The differences are intriguing, the similarities unsettling.

Concentrate

8”x8” unframed encaustic:
turbulent concentrate
the illusion of order in the natural world
the natural world: one stroke
the illusion of control: one stroke
the illusion of random order
dark random order
the inevitability of random order

12”x12” unframed encaustic:
concentrate with static: no do-overs
the illusion of control: no do-overs
the illusion of control: shallow concentrate
the illusion of control: everything

This series of paintings was started in early 2004 as a way of deepening and extending the stripe paintings I had been producing. Indeed, the idea of weaving strands of paint has appeared before in my work to varying degrees, as well as the desire to make paintings that increase in density to an undetermined limit. The bands of paint travel back and forth over each other, building a raised surface as well as a series of variously sized openings in the interstices, little windows into the structure of the construction.

In some, the paint is applied in methodical, random daubs of colour that veil or completely cover the marks underneath. The final painting becomes a field of floating circles, previous generations peering out from between those inhabiting the foreground.
Both a noun and a verb, concentrate is also an admonition to myself and the viewer: look harder.

Nicole Collins
2005

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statement: Fall 2004

One of the many benefits of the life of an artist is when the work affords the ability to travel.
I have had the great good fortune to exhibit my paintings in the New York, London, Tokyo; the accompanying journeys have been immensely inspirational. “Work” is involved, yet there is a different time frame during travel from that of the domestic/studio/teaching cycle of most days that innately contains significant time for thinking and looking. An openness to and awareness of these new places and people asserts itself.

And now Switzerland.

everything everything
One of my goals in life is to make something in this chaotic world that offers a moment for contemplation and I choose to do it with paint on canvas. Encaustic paint is pigment and wax applied in a molten state, which then sets up immediately; a characteristic most significant to the meaning of these paintings.
The colour sequences are arranged in an idiosyncratic order; a system of intuitive random positioning of 16 colours each of which has resonance for me.
With any luck that resonance will reach out to the viewer and strike a bell.
The marks, the stripes, the bars, the lines are all evidence of an act.
Broken or solid, all are vertical; reaching to a higher plane or tumbling below...
it depends on your point of view.
trail
push
forge
carve
flood
stroke
skip
plow
drag
slide
spin
unravel

There is a genetic memory imprinted in me: working the field with the scythe, you start in the northwest corner and make your way to the southeast corner. It’s a good days work and nobody messes with you because you’re holding a big steel blade. That is what I strive for in my studio practice. That, and a certain looseness, like the way Neil Young plays guitar: fluid, but with focus and intention.

Nicole Collins
Fall 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statement: 2003

"evolution of a painting exhibition: branch
or how I got from there to here"

I am interested in order. In April 2002 I travelled to Tokyo for an exhibition and revelled in the aesthetic clarity at every turn. I had the rare opportunity to wander, gaze, contemplate. The extended rectangle of the scroll format was everywhere, from museum to marketplace. I frequently found myself sitting in gardens. Strangely, in one of the most congested cities in the world, I saw more green in those two weeks in April than, well, ever. I brought back many photographs but one in particular of a specific branch in Jingu Naien, haunted my studio for over a year. Its searching line has infected everything I have made since.

I want to make something in this chaotic world that offers a moment for contemplation and I do it with paint on canvas. An illusion I know, but satisfying nevertheless. Encaustic paint is applied in a molten state and then sets up immediately. This characteristic suits me fine.

Three distinct elements have asserted themselves in this body of work:
Growth and its disruption
Destruction by Fire
Distilled Remains

In some of the paintings I impose an idiosyncratic ordering (free-hand stripes) while acknowledging my interest in and indebtedness to the history of abstraction. There have been innumerable artists who have engaged the repeated line, whose work I admire: Bridget Riley, Sol LeWitt, Sean Scully and most of all Agnes Martin, but I could not find a compelling enough motivation to take that route. I found it when I saw the vibrant coloured strands of my daughters‚ hair as I combed it out in the sunlight. Other stripe paintings emerged as a way of parsing the complexity of plant material.

Empty out the colour and what is left? A distillation: the bare marks, the texture of the canvas. The black is made of ground charcoal and wax. This what is left behind.

From "What Painting Is" by James Elkins:
"It is the virtue of alchemy to point out that self-immolation is also self-nourishment, and the alchemists valued circulation as a strengthening agent; each time the substance is boiled away it is returned to itself in a purer state."

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Nicole Collins
October 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statement: 2003

A few quick thoughts on Jingu Naien I, II & III

These paintings were made in summer 2003 but they began (as did the bulk of my upcoming show at Wynick/Tuck Gallery in late October) during the Spring of 2002 in Tokyo. I was there to install an exhibition of my work at the Canadian Embassy Gallery. The planning and preparation for this trip was monumental (from my experience at any rate) but when I arrived I was met by efficient professionals who pretty much had everything under control thereby leaving me with some unexpected time on my hands, alone in Tokyo. I took full advantage and visited every major garden, park and museum. It is extremely rare for me to be alone with no specific obligations (day-job, family, studio practice, teaching) and I was pleasantly overwhelmed by the experience. On one particular day I found myself wandering through the Meiji-Jingu Shrine, an enormous green area right in the centre of hyper-congested Tokyo. The Emperor Meiji had built an inner garden, a sanctuary for his Empress, the Jingu Naien a beautiful area of winding woodland paths and serene open vistas. It was here that I first and finally sat down and took a very deep breath and simply looked without any expectations. There was no sound of traffic, I was completely transported. I looked at flowers and water and trees and it all sunk in in a way that would be virtually impossible at home.

These paintings are not meant as literal representations, but I hope they reflect the experience of smelling green, experiencing the miracle of growth and decay that can only be felt in uninterrupted contemplation out of doors.

Nicole Collins
October 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statement: 2002

Painting is my subject and all subsequent readings (including my own) are subjective and incidental. The titles offer an entry, but come after the act, that is, they are suggested in the looking and reflect an observation of the process followed, as well as the influence of books, music, people, the natural world and other art that may be attracting my attention at a given time.

Each painting has its own innate practical logic which develops through a series of yes-no decisions. I lay down a ground colour. Will it be opaque? Yes? No? OK transparent in parts then. Yes. And then it's one mark at a time. And when I am truly in attendance (which is the state I strive for at all times) I load the brush and look for the mark on the canvas. There. And there. Not there. There. Yes. Yes. No. Each mark has a reason to be there.

While, clearly, intellect plays a significant role in the process, more important is my desire to embed an emotional code into the paintings. Through a subjective and intuitive process of trial and error I am developing a language built of marks which, not surprisingly, is very difficult to quantify in words.

Recently I have been re-investigating the notion of illusion in painting. In mathematics it would be referred to as the "Z" axis (if Y is height and X is width then Z is depth, the diagonal). Having painted without referential images for a number of years now, I have seen the work become flatter and more opaque. The empirical notion of the painting as an object first and foremost was the central condition. But this train of thought led to an end game and I needed a way to break out beyond that.

Space, the next frontier (by no means the final) beckoned. I'm finding it's really a matter of not connecting the dots, at least not all of them. It's leaving space and creating the illusion of space through the use of line, transparency, layering. And what space is this exactly? Location is fluid in this work and disorientation common. But these paintings are where it’s at. It is a state of mind.

Nicole Collins
2002

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------