Joan Maureen Collins starts each painting with the brushstroke of a feather dipped in ink. The effect is ephemeral – the mark will be covered by paint – but for Collins, it’s a spiritual start to her process.
“The feather – some people see it as life before you if you see a feather. I think that’s what art’s like: It passes down,” Collins says at her home and studio in Scottsdale. “It’s kind of an homage to that.”
The abstract artist started her journey at 13, first painting a jungle-themed mural in her bedroom. She continued her artistic efforts, keeping sketchbooks on hand when she traveled, and began watercolor painting while living in Boston. Her growth as an artist “just took off from there.”
Her reverence for nature guides her artistry, as well as her day job as a renewable energy consultant. “They kind of feed each other, so it energizes me,” Collins says. “The art helps me see that there is more than one way to solve something, so I can pull that back into my work.”
Collins paints while traveling, including on an annual trip to Ireland that started 10 years ago when she booked an arts workshop on Sherkin Island in West Cork. She’s since built an artist community and exhibited work there. At home, she’s converted her living room into a studio. “It’s just so immersive,” she says.
In each series of paintings Collins creates, she will meditate on different elements of the natural world. Her latest is Entangled Beauty, which she’ll exhibit this fall. It’s in the abstract that she feels she can best communicate the complexities of nature.
“The wild of nature really is abstract,” she says. “It’s micro and macro, and it’s 360 all around you. [Abstraction is] the language that helps me explain that.”
See her work at artatblackmountain.com or on Instagram @artbyjoancollins.
In addition to traditional paintbrushes, Collins uses objects she finds outside or is given, including branches, dried plant stalks and rope. The natural implements add texture and “authenticity.”
Collins also employs squeegees or rollerballs. Often used in silk-screening to pull a swath of paint across a stencil, squeegees help Collins add layers and texture.
Before any brushes, or feathers, mark a canvas, Collins maps out ideas in her sketchbooks. Larger bound sketchbooks are where she’ll draw, write and add other media, while her accordion sketchbooks allow her to focus on color.
Working with canvases that can range from 1 foot to more than 6 feet tall, she uses a stepstool to reach high, or sit on it to get face-to-face with the bottom of her canvas. “I don’t work with [the canvas] one way all of the time,” Collins says. She’ll rotate a piece to reset her perspective. “When you flip it, your eyes readjust, and suddenly you see where you’re supposed to go. It’s a neat life lesson, too.”
For an abstract artist, color is critical. Collins opts to mix her paints in larger bowls and buckets instead of on a palette.
