Robert Collins

The beech-dominated woodlands of west Gloucestershire, clothing much of the Cotswold escarpment and running down to the Severn vale, provide the chief subject for Robert Collins’ fifth exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery since 1991. A closeness to this region where he was born finds expression also in Collins’ paintings of certain old rites and rituals – a glimpse into the world of Wodwose, the original Green Man of the woods – which once marked out the programme of the English year.

‘Beech trees’, says Collins, ‘have a limb-like character, they look almost human with sensual forms and smooth bark with fleshy wrinkles and creases in the bends and joints of the trunks and branches.’ Painting his familiar woodlands through the seasons, sometimes with a focus on individual trees seen as portraits (cat. nos. 4 and 10), Collins came to appreciate them as silent observers of change and human presence, in their gravitas almost custodians of the landscape, once regularly coppiced to provide wood for charcoal by the agricultural labourers who were his own forbears over several generations.

Forays into wildwood further afield have yielded other approaches. At Offa’s Dyke above the Wye Valley, overlooking the ruins of Tintern Abbey, the woodland is hazel coppice, with mature pines providing ideal light conditions for the rare Martagon Lily (no. 1). Towards the northern end of the Forest of Dean Collins has painted Betty Daw’s Wood where tiny wild daffodils, their pale yellow or parchment-coloured leaves surmounted by bright yellow trumpets, grow in great yellow drifts (no. 12). In Midger Woods, carpeted with moss and fern enveloping fallen trees, wild Lily of the Valley and Herb Paris grow and there prevails a peaceful atmosphere engendering an ideal environment for wildlife – a place as close as any other, so Collins sees it, to Kenneth Grahame’s Wild Wood which many will still cherish from childhood.

‘As a countryman through and through’, Collins observes, ‘I feel a part of my being is held in the landscape.’ Aspects of this countryman’s relationship with wild nature and his role in its ordering and management through centuries of agricultural use emerge in the old rural rites. In his paintings of Morris dancers evoking the sunrise on May Day or, at Helston in Cornwall, the Flora or Furry dance when over a thousand participants weave through the town in a symbolic progress from childhood to maturity, Collins pays homage to these traditions. With its stock characters out of history and myth, The Mummer’s Play is another such event, celebrating the completion of the year.

Technically, Robert Collins deploys in these latest large-scale paintings, spanning a period of some five years, a typically bravura approach. He works directly with no preliminary drawing, mostly on his feet throughout, handling brushes sometimes lengthened by three-foot extensions. True to the example of his earlier teacher at Cheltenham College of Art, Virginia Robinson, daughter of J S Sargent’s favourite pupil Douglas Gray, Collins’ compositions give off an infectious energy, sometimes (as in no. 2) giving a feeling of lively movement, an exhilarated run through autumn woods, while others convey an overarching serenity, all is stillness and mystery (no. 7).

‘Much as I admire the prodigious skills of the Barbizon painters such as Corot or Rousseau, whose dedication to woodland subjects prompted Napoleon III to create for them the first nature reserve selected on solely aesthetic grounds’, comments Collins, ‘it is still those Russian painters known as the Wanderers, Shishkin and Kuindzhi specially, with whom I can identity most strongly: painters of landscape with ‘soul’, of  an experience of landscape they valued and understood as a metaphor for their national consciousness, which is how I feel about the woodlands with their flora and fauna in my own home region.’

Robert Collins was born in rural Gloucestershire in 1952 and educated at Gloucester College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. He has lived and worked in London and Sussex, where he was active as an art therapist in Brighton between 1978 and 1982. In 1989 he returned to Gloucestershire to live only a few miles from where he was born, with a view to expressing through his art his deep feeling for the connection of four generations of his family with this part of rural England.

He has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1984 and has contributed to some twelve of the Gallery’s theme exhibition including The Ridgeway (1986), Goethe’s Italian Journey (1987) and Everyone sang: a view of Siegfried Sassoon and his world by twenty-five painters today (2006). In 1988 works by Robert Collins were featured in THE RIDGEWAY, EUROPE’S OLDEST ROAD: paintings from the Francis Kyle Gallery with an essay by Richard Ingrams (Phaidon Press). In 1990 he showed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and has held one-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1991, 1995, 1998,  2002 and 2011. In August 2009 he took part in Anthony Gormley’s installation for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, using his hour on the plinth to make a painting in oils of the view across the square towards Nelson’s Column.

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