Biography

Robert Collins was born in Gloucester in 1955 and educated at Gloucester College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. Between 1978 and 1982 he was active as an art therapist in Brighton. He has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1984 and been a contributor to some thirteen of the Gallery's theme exhibitions, including The Ridgeway (1986), Goethe's Italian Journey (1987), and Blue, White: Still Life on a Classic Theme by Contemporary Painters (1989) and Everyone Sang: A View of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty-five painters today (2006). In 1990 he showed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and has held one-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1991, 1995, 1998 and 2002.

Collins is a painter of remarkable versatility, working mostly in oils, and expressing himself with equal conviction in landscape (painting in all weathers and always en plein air), still life, interiors and architectural subjects. 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).

Robert Collins

Robert Collins is a painter of remarkable versatility, working mostly in oils, and expressing himself with equal conviction in landscape (painting in all weathers and always en plein air), still life, interiors and architectural subjects.

'The challenge I set myself,' Collins observes, 'is to paint something at once fresh, unfussy, delicate and vigorous as a flower, so that the paint itself can become these things'. In realising this objective, he acknowledges a debt to his early teacher at Cheltenham College of Art, Valerie Robinson, the daughter of John Singer Sargent's favourite pupil, Douglas Gray. Always working directly, with no preliminary drawing, (typically on his feet throughout as he deploys brushes lengthened by three-foot extensions) Collins tackles his subjects with a bravura worthy indeed of Sargent, who understood so well how the oil medium, handled with the necessary dash and a strong nerve, can itself take on all the freshness of light.

A bold, confident technique is matched in Collins by a painstaking approach to composition. 'These are pictures,' as John Russell Taylor has observed, 'which are thought as well as felt.' In his tall, eighteenth-century studio, once a schoolhouse, Collins tends to prepare several still lifes at once, constructing large sheeted canopies over them to diffuse and distil the desired light effects. The preparatory stage can be lengthy: in a subject calling for autumn leaves, he recalls, he was obliged to coat the back of each leaf with resin to stop it curling. From such artifice come disarmingly simple arrangements, which speak eloquently of the artist's other, more spiritual mentor from an earlier time, Jean-Baptiste Chardin, with whom he shares a 'passionate feeling for the organic, for the sensuous touch of a petal or a rind.'

For Collins, in his own way, painting has the character of a meditative exercise, a métier or craft as much as an art, in the pursuit of which not contrasts but, rather, subtle harmonies of colour, texture and mood are coaxed from the different ingredients in the subject matter, which seem to enjoy a friendly, uncompetitive relationship with each other.

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