The tension between form and line has been a subconscious American pre-occupation from our earliest days. CJ Collins’ vibrant work dances on the edge of the precarious moment where line and mass are reconciled. Her intuitive moves, running in layers which snuggle and snag each other, form less a dance than a ritualistic walkabout of discovery. Big scale is evident no matter the dimension. Never claustrophobic, they breathe with the freedom of the open sky, the riff of a jukebox tune and the vast distance of possibility. It is a freedom which implies not Nature, but the mind’s conjectured landscape.

Collins’ powerful results are squeezed from a deceptively straightforward process. Drawing from life in freely calligraphed moves, the sketches are then xeroxed onto acetate transparencies. She layers and positions one atop the other until she discovers what she wants. Picasso called it making a find. The artist uses a dominant buzz color, electronic in intensity, on which she intervenes an intuitive graphic activity. These compounded arrangements interact with her color solids. Even her blacks read as full palette! Lines race across the layered field of tangled automatic writing and the two, calligraphed and color block, form a teasing argument between hand and LCD screen glow in an otherwise formalist set up. Their humor, their reach and their insistence on gaze make them stretch-your-arms-wide works. The effect is surprising for its power and attitude. It is unrepentant, fully charged and with a take-it-or-leave-it confidence by the hand of an artist fully committed to her own path.
- Catherine Redmond, New York, NY

Statement
As far back as I can remember, drawing has been at the core of my art making. It’s a natural way for me to record and consider the mighty and infinite shapes and forms contained in NATURE. What is more, while recording those shapes and forms in my sketchbooks, considering their relationships and meaning occurs simultaneously or as an obvious next step in my thought and feeling process. Back in the studio, those considerations, or at least a sense of those considerations, as intimate or grand as I intuit and inhabit them, inform and motivate the why, what and how I paint. - CJ Collins

Courtesy of hpgrp Gallery