Jacob Collins: Landscapes and Still Lifes

Jacob Collins

Landscapes and Still Lifes

Landscapes and Still Lifes

I first saw paintings by Jacob Collins at our New York gallery’s soloexhibition of his work in 2010. I grew up seeing representational painting and at the time of the exhibition, I was immersed in “academic” painting while studying art history at Boston University. I connected acutely with Collins’ paintings, far more than I had been able to with his historic predecessors. I felt elements of familiarity and sincerity in the work; they struck me as compelling and unique compositions, yet tied to the canon of Classical painting. I recognized that the objects and places he chose had a personal connection to the artist, which was made more evident with the knowledge that he painted them from life, and never from photographs.

What continues to fascinate me about the landscape and still life paintings by Jacob Collins are not the subjects themselves, but rather the human presence that lingers just beyond the frame of the picture. When I look at an inanimate object in Jacob’s paintings, I am at first transfixed by the skillful and deliberate application of paint, and then I am drawn in and moved by the subject’s complexity. They are not just paintings of fruits, or instruments, or trees and countryside; rather, they contain an aura of humanity. Whether it’s an orange – carefully manipulated by hand, or a coastline with a sprinkle of civilization in the distance, each composition seems carefully crafted to place the viewer just far enough away so they may reflect on the scene in relation to their own life.

This is our first exhibition of Jacob Collins’ work at Adelson Galleries Boston. My hope is that our audience will have the same profound response that I had when I first saw these paintings.

Adam Adelson Director

Pomegranates II , 2015 Oil on canvas, 13 x 18 inches

Oranges II , 2015

Oil on canvas, 21 x 28 inches

Study for Bed I , 2007

Oil on canvas, 9 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches

Orange II , 2008

Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches

Peonies in a Glass , 2014 Oil on canvas, 12 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches

Peonies in a Glass Bowl I , 2014 Oil on canvas on panel, 11 1/2 x 14 inches

Paper with Drawing Instruments , 2015

Oil on canvas, 18 x 44 inches

Banjo with Drawing , 2015 Oil on canvas, 52 x 30 inches

Violin , 2015

Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

Study for Banjo , 2012

Oil on panel, 7 1/4 x 14 inches

Study for Banjo with Drawing , 2015 Oil on canvas, 18 x 10 3/8 inches

Study for Art Books , 2012

Oil on panel, 7 1/4 x 14 inches

5/8 inches

Studio in Sharon (Grisaille) , 2012

Oil on canvas on panel, 23 5/8 x 15

Studio in Sharon , 2012

Oil on canvas, 54 x 42 inches

Livingroom Interior , 2000

Oil on canvas on panel, 34 x 30 inches

Study for Yellow House Lake Champlain, 2010

Oil on canvas on panel, 9 x 12 inches

Ocean Twilight , 2009

Oil on canvas, 12 x 24 inches

Shenendoah

Oil on canvas on panel, 7 7/8 x 11 7/8 inches

Valley Hay Bales, 2005

River Vista , 2009

Oil on canvas on panel, 9 x 12 inches

Maple Tree , 2009

Oil on canvas on panel, 12 x 9 inches

Labor Day Beach II , 2010

Oil on canvas on panel, 12 x 16 inches

Ixtapa Island, Mid Day , 2010

Oil on canvas on panel, 12 x 16 inches

Above the Jackson Falls, New Hampshire , 2012

Oil on panel, 11 x 14 inches

Apple Tree, Normandy , 2002

Oil on canvas on panel, 10 x 8 inches

Yellow House at Thompson’s Point at Twilight , 2012

Oil on canvas, 28 x 42 inches

Jacob Collins

By Adam Gopnik

“Drawing,” Ingres once said, in words that were for a century pinned up in every art studio in the world, “is the probity of art.” The pinned-up labels are doubtless as extinct as that word, ‘probity,’ has become obscure. Probity in Ingres’ context has a delicate meaning – something just more than mere technical foundation, something just less than hard moral proof. That’s what drawing is for Jacob Collins: a hard-won craft that still has in it the feel of an ethical activity. I know Jacob Collins as a father, a husband, and I know him very well as a teacher – a teacher of amazing patience and point – but I know him first of all as a man who draws, and who thinks in drawing, that fine, lost, dying art of drawing.

To watch Jacob draw is to see the act in its pure, high form, a matter not of a thing registered with a quick dash, or stylized with a signature gesture – gestures and dashes are not, ahem, his time of day – but patiently, tirelessly, wooed and won, hour after hour and day after day from the dim ambiguous white noise of the visual world. His is not the happy act of a man in love with his own handwriting; it is the sober act of a man decrypting messages from the world. Each touch, each line is considered…and each thing argued and reargued on the page. The wizardry apparent at the end – how did you do that? – is balanced by the artisanal pursuit that got it done: it just takes time, the method answers. Collins believes in the dignity of drawing, and to look at his drawings, or the paintings they derive from, is to see a man in full possession of the dignity – call it the probity – of a tradition.

Yet it would be wrong to see Collins as merely reactionary, narrowly revivalist. An

unapologetic lover of the old traditions of learning and drawing – his studio is mobbed by the familiar old plaster heads and bodies of Greeks and Romans – he is no more nostalgic for an imaginary past as he draws from the model than, say, a Richard Wilbur or a John Hollander is when using rhyme. It’s what can be won by tradition, not what tradition has already won for itself, that moves him. He is uncomfortable with the label realist, because he does not want to be seen a reporter on the passing scene of life. Instead, he sees himself as a representational artist in a much older, Renaissance sense – a man who delves deep for the secrets of why things look the way they do, and who makes an unapologetic commitment to his own idea of beauty. Yet where so many of his fellows in the revivalist corner – a corner that seems now about to claim its own larger space in an art world no longer driven by an idea of progress (or, rather, driven off a cliff by that idea) – seem to end with a rear-view mirror idea of what beauty is, Collins’ idea of beauty remains idiosyncratic. He’s got his own things. He is drawn to “Biblical” heads, to wizened faces, to Atlantic coast houses, to women’s bodies that are neither too elongated nor too plaintively aged – but above all his sense of beauty is rooted in what one can only call fidelity. Fidelity is not only in the sense of faithfulness, but also the other way we use it, in the slightly ironic sense we use it when we speak of “high fidelity” in recordings: the patient reproduction of all the true facts about a sound, or sight, with all its overtones, ambiguities, half notes, dynamics, as perfectly mirrored in the reproduction as it can be. And fidelity in the sense, too, that we use about marriages – fidelity meaning sticking to it, and sticking it out.

Ingres went on to say, in words quoted less often even back when Ingres was quoted: “To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that.” See what remains…A thing that fascinates me, at least, in Collins’ art is the way that the sober mastery of drawing in his works somehow becomes, as he

transforms them into paintings, for all their virtuosity –and one looks at his transparent glass, his gray approaching storm clouds, with astonishment as the sheer stubborn skill – turns into something austere and, for the most part, strangely sad. His painting has the earnest morality and melancholia that descends from the tradition of Thomas Eakins. It makes me ask, as I look at it, if there is some inherently bittersweet tone in the act of being faithful – if fidelity, in painting as in marriage, enforces a melancholy of its own, as pleasure is submitted to time, and the comfortable, mutable world we know suddenly passes into the frozen world of things made and fixed for good. His paintings don’t look archaic; but they do often look aged, as wine or women’s faces age.

Such subtler questions are ones that a mere appraisal of Collins as a die-hard won’t help us answer. His is, of course, and no denying, an enterprise that time and trend both have banished for a long time to the margins of art. Why draw so perfectly in the age of the iPhone camera? Well, when computers can reproduce the sound of strings what point in learning viola? Or, rather, what point in the string quartet played at home, in the artisanal, the crafted, the traditional, the handmade? Why make art this way – ask just as well, perhaps, why we eat as we do. In that more modest world of achievement, after all, we don’t ask why a chef would chop by hand when the Cuisinart sits on the counter. The chef’s knife isn’t a forerunner of the machine; its flexibility and variety is a constant reproach to it. The assertion of the artisanal is as much a response to a particular time as the acceptance of the artificial. In some ways, Collins’ assertion of the old-fashioned is his way of arguing with, and out of, his own time. One might even say – with a taste for art-paradox more post-modern than Collins’ own – that he is drawing back into its probity. No small ambition for a man armed only with the four unchanging artist’s tools: a pencil, a model, a paint box and a purpose.

Biography

By Lisa Bush Hankin

A leading figure in the contemporary revival of classical painting, Jacob Collins (b. 1964) was born and received his formal training in New York, and also studied in Paris. He embraces a variety of subject matter and is equally adept at portraiture (his sitters have included J. Paul Getty Jr., President George Herbert Walker Bush, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger) as he is at painting landscape, still-life and figural themes. Collins, who has said he aims to “paint with the skills of past masters while still feeling fresh,” relies on meticulous observation, careful draftsmanship, and dramatic use of darkness and illumination to create works that – while set in the present – exude a sense of timelessness.

In addition to his own painting, Collins is also a sought-after teacher who believes in rigorous classical training in disciplines that hark back to the Renaissance. While living and working in New York, Collins has established several painting ateliers in the tradition of the French academy, finding the rich exchange of ideas among like-minded peers to be stimulating and beneficial to his work as well. Collins has been the subject of over 20 solo exhibitions, and his work is represented in numerous prestigious public and private collections including Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and Amherst’s Mead Art Museum, among others.

Checklist

Above the Jackson Falls, New Hampshire

Oil on panel

x 14 inches

$36,000

Apple Tree, Normandy

Oil on canvas on panel

x 8 inches

$8,000

Banjo with Drawing

Oil on canvas

x 30 inches

Ixtapa Islands, Mid Day

2010

Oil on canvas on panel

12 x 16 inches

$13,000

Labor Day Beach II

Oil on panel

x 16 inches

$14,000

Livingroom Interior

Oil on canvas

x 30 inches

$35,000

Maple Tree

Oil on canvas on panel

x 12 inches

$6,000

p 34

Ocean Twilight 2009 Oil on canvas

12 x 24 inches

$18,000

River Vista 2009 Oil on canvas on panel 9 x 12 inches

$7,500

p 8

Study for Bed I

2007 Oil on canvas 9 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches

$8,500

p 10

Orange II 2008 Oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

$8,500

Shanendoah Valley Hay Bales 2005 Oil on canvas on panel 7 3/8 x 11 3/8 inches

$8,500

p 32

Study for Yellow House Lake Champlain, 2010 Oil on canvas on panel 9 x 12 inches

$6,000

p 6

Oranges II 2015 Oil on canvas 21 x 28 inches

$35,000

Studio in Sharon

Oil on canvas

x 42 inches $120,000

p 20

Volin 2015 Oil on canvas 30 x 26 inches

$50,000

p 16

Paper with Drawing Instruments 2015 Oil on canvas 18 x 44 inches

$65,000

Studio in Sharon (Grisalle) 2012 Oil on canvas on panel 23 5/8 x 15 5/8 inches

p 50

Yellow House at Thompson’s Point at Twilight, 2012 Oil on canvas 28 x 42 inches

$75,000

p 12

Peonies in a Glass

2014 Oil on canvas

12 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches

$9,500

Study for Art Books 2012 Oil on panel 7 1/4 x 14 inches

p 14

Peonies in a Glass Bowl I 2014 Oil on canvas on panel 11 1/2 x 14 inches

$12,000

Study for Banjo 2012 Oil on panel 7 1/4 x 14 inches $12,000

p 4

Pomegranates II

2015 Oil on canvas 13 x 18 inches

$20,000

Study for Banjo with Drawing 2015 Oil on canvas 18 x 10 3/8 inches