Rebecca Collins: New Paintings

About

Rebecca Collins is a contemporary Scottish Artist and lives and works on the north-west coast of Scotland. Her practice is and has been for many years, one of solitude.

Even her 200 year-old small green studio – so crookedly positioned on its own, itself seems to be a lonely outpost on the edge of our island, an outpost surrounded completely and utterly by the majesty of Landscape in its purest form. As the Artist herself has said,
‘The absolute presence and intrigue of the landscape serve as continuous inspiration for my practice.’

Her deep familiarity with this part of Scotland serves her well, having been a hardy witness to the extremity of change, not just of the seasons but of the light, the atmospheric conditions and the colours, she understands and indeed uses the versatility this realm can afford a painter. Hers is not the classical style of Poussin and Claude where majesty is balanced harmoniously with conventions, nor the giddy expansive sublime of Casper David Friedrich, instead we get a distillation, a reduction – something removed, heightened and relocated in the picture plane of her canvas. Her formal concerns are key to how the artist wants us to view her images; the compositions are often sections of the landscape – a mountainside, a top, clouds, perhaps just a natural surface. Removed of their whole, these almost abstracted forms have a disjointed loneliness, perhaps echoing the artist’s equivalent for the distant memory of the experience.

For the last few years, Rebecca has had one man shows and regularly exhibits in Edinburgh and London.