Carson Collins

The Littoralist Paintings of Carson Collins

The Littoralist Paintings of Carson Collins

The Painter
It is evident when engaged in conversation with the painter Carson Collins that one is discussing issues with a warm and literate man. The subject of his art is the four elements in their most majestic setting - the shoreline: earth, air, fire, and water. The artist has at one and the same time an ebullient nature and the ‘gravitas’ of original introspection. Tall and of large trim frame, his bearing strikes one as being in stark contrast to the fragile glazed surfaces and delicate analogous tonalities of color to be seen in his seascape paintings.
Of his personal history he will tell you that he is of Irish and Cherokee ancestry and that he was born on the 25th November 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the family relocating to Longboat Key Florida in 1958. With pride he will describe his mother who holds a Masters degree in art education and who home schooled her son in the techniques of painting in oil and water color before he was ten years old.
When reminiscing about his father, his speech slows down, his eyes narrow, and his large frame becomes restive and curved. He will tell you that his father received a full disability pension from the army, after which he became a lawyer, who due to his severe injuries in WW II remained mentally in that conflict for the rest of his life.
As for the artist himself, the Vietnam war affected his life. The fact that he had been drafted interrupted his plans to study art at university and redirected for a brief time his artistic ambitions to those of medicine. After high school, Collins received B.A. degrees in psychology and chemistry at the University of South Florida at Tampa in 1973. Four years later he received his M.D. from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “I never did my internship but in 1978 quit allopathic practice in order to concentrate on painting full-time.”
A passionate traveller, he has since painted in Mauritius in view of the Indian Ocean, the Stockholm Archipellago in the Baltic Sea, St. Barthelemy in the West Indes, Honolulu, Manhattan and most recently, Costa Rica, Central America. Throughout his travels the relationship of the sky to the sea in his “Ocean Series” has been the central motif of his painting. The first paintings of The Ocean Series began on St. Barthelemy in 1978, the concept being a focused space into which his mythopoeic imagination has poured its colors.
In a more precise and unconcious way, this singularity of motif reflects a truism of all serious painting, that the choice of subject attempts to resolve the psychological dynamics of the artist’s philosophical preferences. In the case of Collins, this dynamic must also include his wanderlust. His art is a sincere and authentic objectification of his response to this dynamic and the emotional paradigms that ensue. His seascapes are delicately painted and deceptively reductive paens to littoral patterns; used to sublimate anxiety and to celebrate self-renewal in equal measure.

The Paintings

A formal analysis of Collins’ paintings must be predicated on an “a priori” analytical distinction. In Western art two different, though inclusive, intentions exist. The first is to define an art that wills its way through the eyes into the heart. Such art is called retinal art. The second wills its way into the mind. Such art is called non-retinal art. All art has both intentions at play. The issue of degree and dominance of one over the other is a variable, due to historical period and the artist’s essence. Whether the art is retinal or non-retinal, the artist’s intention is to give depth to the emotional experience of the observer. What differs is emphasis! Expressionist art relies as much on experience as it does subject matter, whereas various forms of classicism tend toward etherial concepts of timeless forms. Such art addresses pure concepts in abstract uses of line and color. The idiosyncracies of the artist are de-emphasized in the service of classic restraint.
Collins’ paintings’ poetic feel is in large part due to the fluid transparency between these two positions. His color and brushstroke devices have precedent in the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851). For example the vortex of white, yellow, and orange in Turner’s “Light and Color” 1843 (Tate Gallery, London) in which Turner utilizes the color theories of the German poet Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832), wherein red is at the top and green at the bottom of the poet’s chromatic circle. Collins is in many ways a spiritual descendant of this emperical romantic approach to color. Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) the French Impressionist painter living in London during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 - 71, accompanied by fellow artist Camille Pissarro (1830 - 1903), came into contact with Turner’s paintings. Although this introduction shows no clear sign of influence on the Frenchman, other than an appreciation for fluid blends of color, one does see in the case of Monet an appreciation for subsuming subject matter to the act of painting as a thing in itself. Such can be traced back to examples of early 19th century English landscape painting. Indeed in a letter to Wynford Dewhurst (Nov. 1902) Pissarro writes,”The watercolors and painting of Turner and Constable, the canvasses of Old Chrome, have certainly had an influence on us.” (1)
This is the organic and romantic aspect of Collins’ art. However, the geometrical structure and close attention to analogous color, heightened by the use of a split-complimentary, can be closely related to the theories of American ( German - born) Bauhaus painter Joseph Albers (1888 - 1976) whose famous series of paintings and lithographs based on the square exploited subtle chromatic harmonies. Jack Burnham has noted, “In all of his (Albers’) “Homage to the Square” series, variables are reduced to one color relationship. The “art” of Albers’ paintings stem from two criteria. Its compositional symplicity through concentric squares relates it to the field paintings of Barnett Newman (1905 - 70), Mark Rothko (1903 -70), and Kenneth Noland (1924 - ).”
These painters have a “formal similarity” which “ is a lack of asymmetrical, unbalanced forms operating in both dimensions of the painting”. (2) Collins’ utilization of the rectangle in the square - the divisions of the painting between sky and ocean, with the horizon line as the base of the square - is a continuation of the tradition of Albers and the painters that came after him. With Collins, however, the musical interval of the surf is a breaking out of of the square’s solid frontal presence. It introduces a new approach to the color field tradition of two directional movements across and through a painting’s picture plane.
Again within this image and emphasis on retinal art, Collins’ painting is the simultaneously reflective and transparent surface of the water and has connection to Monet, the “Nympheas” of 1916 - 1919 (Musee de l’Orangerie, Paris) best known as the famous water lillies. As Collins has pointed out, it is these late paintings of the master that have deeply influenced his own work. Monet’s ability to convey the pond’s depth, the sky and the lillies simultaneously is carried over into collins’ painting as the mirror image of the sun dissolving into and reflected on the ocean. The surf (like Monet’s water lillies) establishes the lucid plane of the water, and the surf’s intervals, between rising and falling, is similar to Monet’s placement of floating flowers.

(1) “The Chronicle of Impressions” - Bernard Devenir, Pg. 71
Blufinch press (Little, Brown & Co.) 1993

(2) “The Structure of Art - Jack Burnham, Pg. 50 George Brazilier 1971


Technique

Collins’ methodology in creating his “Ocean Series” has been consistent since his first canvas on the subject. To begin, he builds up the surface either through a liquid acrylic polymer medium in which are suspended titanium oxide coated mica flakes or through pure colors blended with the use of a similar acrylic medium. Both approaches extend the pigment colors and allow for infinitesimal hue value changes over a large, seemingly flat, field of color. This technique emphasizes translucency, depth, and luminosity.
The blending of colors begins with an overall unifying color, applied with a wallpaper hanger’s brush made of China bristle. This prime color establishes the mood of the painting; the mood of the situation before the observer. It is the key hue of an adjacent series of analogous colors. This blend is applied as horizontal stripes that are then fused into a seamless chromatic sequence. Over this a blend of split complimentary colors, based on the prime color, are added as a focal interest in the surf and modulations of sky patterns. In some paintings two sets of prime color and a corresponding split complimentary are used.

The Psychology of the Artist as it relates to his Paintings

Collins will tell you of his preference to work in a studio where the dominant light source comes from the west. He conceives his seascapes as having a western horizon. This meditation on a setting sun is ancient and universal. It combines the internal space of our oneness with the universe with the recognition of our own mutability. At the seashore, man’s receptivity to and need for the ocean is at once symbolic of our connection with the mother and physiological in our connection to it. We have the same proportion of salt in our blood as salt to water in the world’s oceans. The circularity of the moon’s cycles and their conjunction with the height of the tides not only connects us with the mother symbol of the ocean, but also the notion of “the divine” in the curving mass of the horizon as one place on the sphere on which we live. “The wheel may lead our thoughts toward the concept of a “divine” sun, but at this point reason must admit its incompetence; man is unable to define a divine being.” (3) Unable to define the divine, man has created the specialist in tribal ritual whose practices symbolize an intuition of such without defining it. These individuals, through sympathetic magick along with incantations, dance, and potions must call up the spirit of the divine through images that illustrate the concept. The power to do so is the power of the Shaman of pre-industrial society. The artist of our own information age is our cultural Shaman.

(3) “Man and His Symbols” - Carl Jung, Pg. 4 (Introduction) Dell Publishing
1964

Collins’ paintings in one sense are incantations to an idealized father descending below the horizon, or body, of an equally idealized mother. In the western world gold and yellow often refer to a firey intellect, self-discipline and detachment - the sun. Blue is a spiritual color, related to the clarity and coolness of intellect, chastity, eternal happiness, peace and emotions - the ocean. This idealization is abstracted as a circle within a square. The sun is never seen as such in the paintings but implied through the reflection of sky into ocean.The horizon is the base of the square, the top edge of the canvas being the upper edge, the right and left vertical edges completing it. The paintings have about them a sense of the Mandala, a symbol of meditation or contemplation in the Buddist and Hindu religions. In these religious images it is represented by a square within a circle. Collins in his paintings has reversed this configuration.
Collins will tell you he intends the observer of his paintings “to experience a mutual mental and physical beneficial result”. This is a painter who, not having a religious intention in his work, correctly asserts a spiritual one. The sky, ocean, and sun are, therefore, ancient remnants within his subconcious. The paintings are the products of archetypal dynamics within his psyche. Primarily here the universal concept of the “divine” nature of a square within a circle is reversed for the purposes of a seascape. Jungian psychoanalytic thinking illuminates another aspect of this configuration. “Abstract mandalas also appear in European Christian art. Some of the most splendid examples are the rose windows in cathedrals. These are representations of man transposed onto the cosmic plane.” (4) The ceilings of religious architecture are another example.
One of the most striking uses of the mandala is in dome architecture, Islamic and Christian. “The square represents the earth held in fourfold embrace by the circular vault of the sky and hence subject to the ever-flowing wheel of time. When the incessant movement of the universe, depicted by the circle, yields to comprehensible order, one finds the square. The square then presupposes the circle and results from it. The relationship of form and movement, of space and time, is evoked by the mandala.” (5)
The division of the painting established by the horizon line of the ocean approximates a square. This shape at once contains and radiates the power of the circle. Deep within Western conciousness is a symbolic geometry that extends itself into emperical science. Geometry from its beginning had this dual function.

(4) “Man and His Symbols” - Aniela Jaffe “Symbolism in the Visual Arts, Pg. 268
(5) “Sacred Geometry” - Robert Lawlor, Pg. 16. Thames and Hudson 1982

The French ecclesiastic Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 - 1153), founder and abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux observed, “What is God? He is length, width, height, and depth.” (6) All these allusions are contained in Collins’ paintings. This point is further demonstrated in his reference to the Greek concept of the Golden Section: the only ratio that is also a proportion. This geometry is not strictly enforced in the paintings, but is in evidence as an intention. Euclid, the Alexandrian mathematician in his “Elements”, Bk. 6, Prop 3 defines it as, “A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less.” In Collins’ seascapes, the sky and ocean is to the sky as the sky is to the ocean. In algebra it may be expressed as a:b::b:(a+b). Since antiquity the Golden Section has had mystical meaning in art and science. The Renaissance teacher of sacred geometry, Fra Luca Pacioli (c 1445 - 1515) advised his students to concentrate on the transparent solids as a discipline to assist in the comprehension of the metaphysical realities supporting all appearances.
The filial dimension of the paintings is equally rich in information, The painter’s father, the “paterfamilias” of Christian tradition, has achieved through the artist’s transference of his twofold emotions toward him, respect and pity, a new expression of the Sun God motif.
The combat veteran of WW II, destined to be a pained and injured being, raises classic issues of Oedipal conflict and parricide within his son. The sun in the paintings is both death and resurrection. The respect the painter has for his late father stems not only from natural love, but also from the brutal circumstances of his infirmity. But parricidal impulses, normal in all people toward their parents, are further engendered by a wish to end his father’s suffering. Each painting resurrects the father in the artist’s psyche. In the painter’s imagination the sun, once set in a finished work, will rise again in the first energies of the next, to set again and so on. During his life the artist was forever aware that his father was in the “twilight of life”, suffering in spite of medication.
The father is nonetheless revered above, in the paintings, forever curving down to the horizon. The painter’s mother provided her son with the tools and techniques to ritualize this sublimation into art. A painter herself, the pigment and brushes achieve metamorphosis into unconcious mythopoeic activity within the painter as magick gifts to achieve this sublimation. As a protection like the magick sword given by Athena to kill Medusa (death), the artist’s mother (wisdom) is also the stable earth around which the sun moves. She, too, is the curving ocean upon which the sun reflects its numbing power. It is important to reflect that the specific location of the sun, but not the ocean, is ambivalent in these paintings. The square of the sky has many symbolic meanings. Of the many possible associations the most relevant here are the elements, parts of the world, and temperaments.

(6) “On Consideration” - Bernard of Clairvaux

The painter has remarked on the transcendental nature “of the intense colors at sunset, due to the acute angle of the sun”, and, “The ocean is the source of all rivers - a metaphor of death and reincarnation.” He is guided by the evocative idea of transmutation of the viewer’s physical space into the illusionistic space of the painting, where the boundary between the seen and the unseen that a mandala intends to dissolve is achieved by the quiet luminosity of the image.
Each painting is a celebration of renewal coming to its end before it begins again. A celebration of knowing the father and praising the knowledge gained from the mother. Like Hamlet, Collins is in conversation with the ghost of his father on the crenelated architecture of his memories. Through his gift he is absorbed in a reconciliation of love and understanding (Eros) with the consequence upon himself of war’s betrayal (Thanatos). These are mandalas for the Western mind in which all memories - good and bad - are unified and cleansed in the heat of intelligence and the cooling waters of emotion.

Kevin Costello 1999