Ride On All The Rides: Opening for Abstract Artist September 6, 2007

Ride On All The Rides: Opening for Abstract Artist Practicing Automatic Drawing

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6th, 2007, 6pm-8pm

Running: September 6th through October 13th, 2007

Gallery Hours: Tue-Sat 11am – 6pm / Sun 12pm – 6pm

hpgrp gallery is pleased to present the inspired artwork of CJ Collins, an abstract artist balancing the fine line between painting and drawing.

CJ’s interests and skills developed from the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, the New York School of painters, and action painting. One of the foundations of Abstract Expressionist art is the willingness of the artist to let forms and movement on canvas come into being virtually on their own. While the artist creates the work by objective thinking and logical applications of various personal systems, this style can elicit highly emotional responses in the viewer.

Art consultant Robert Curcio observed that in CJ’s paintings, “slowly, layer upon layer was revealed like passing through a thousand veils where it’s the journey that matters and not the beginning or ending. The viewer at an exhibition is looking at the ending with only traces of the painting’s journey. It is those traces that holds the attention and give the paintings their unique character.”

Through early interaction with Dr. Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist renowned for his experiments with creativity, and his recommendation – to manifest what you desire rather than wait for nature’s forces to deliver you to something or someone else’s desire – has informed CJ’s work for many years. She is still practicing that lesson in the attempt to transfer pure emotion directly onto the canvas.

Motivated by her attraction to what things actually are more than what they look like they are, CJ’s work reflects concrete meanings about images of places and forms that are felt rather than seen. Her signature works of dense, linear patterns are composed by projecting sketches (ink drawings on paper converted to transparencies) onto large, hanging canvasses and reproducing them on the surface in various media. Each painting is essentially overlapping, randomly arranged replicas of many small drawings. By this process, the work as a whole is more than the sum of its parts and owes its vitality to the alchemy that results when one scale is transformed into another. Her formal coup is to integrate the spirit of the intimate gesture of drawing into the larger scale; the paintings retain, even magnify, the distinct nuances and vitality of the sketches, while realizing the advantages of the more expansive form of painting. Painting and drawing from this strategy opens up infinite composition possibilities.

CJ’s treatment of her source material, the sketches, is intuitive and can be called automatic drawing. The images she creates, including the net-like forms and swirling biomorphic shapes that recur in her work, make their way onto the paper via a circuitous route through her subconscious, she noting the end result is best when it is a surprise, the most distant from her conscious self. This approach stems from her embrace of the basic premise of abstraction, one of which is the perception of the world as the dynamic interplay of patterns, shapes and movement.

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Official Website: http://www.hpgrpgallery.com