The Art Work Of Dana Collins on Exhibit

July 1st – August 28^th, 2009

Dana Collins has exhibited her paintings, drawings, and sculpture in over four dozen solo and juried group exhibitions in New York, Florida and throughout New England and the Midwest. Her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree was from Washington University , and she received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York. She also studied as an undergraduate at Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and did additional post-graduate work at Arrowmont School, Columbia College, and the University of Illinois.  Her numerous awards include the Sisselman Award from the Berkshire Museum and the Sculptor’s Guild Competition in New York.

She retired from college teaching in 2004. She is currently a Studio Art Consultant for the College Board in Princeton, New Jersey, and conducts workshops  in studio teaching in California and throughout the Midwest. As Art Director of the Prairie Art Center Collins  organizes both art exhibitions and the annual High School Portfolio Competition.

Thirty of her landscape pastels and watercolors will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Quad City Botanical Center in Rock Island during July and August, 2008. She enjoys gardening, is a published poet, and a violist with the Illinois Valley Symphony Orchestra.

N. Dana Collins is included in the current Marquis “Who’s Who Among American Women,”  “Who’s Who in America.”and “Who’s Who in the World.” She is a resident of Princeton, IL.

Medium and Explanation:  These works are part of a series of landscape paintings in Pastel and Watercolor on archival rag paper.

Dana Collins does not work from photographs.  Like all of her landscapes, these were done from direct observation as she worked from a small, light rowboat on the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Speaking of this series, she said, “Then I first began working on the Mississippi, years ago, it was in interest in the effects of light on color, and the interaction of shapes and their reflections that motivated me.  As the sites became more familiar, they came to have personal meaning as well.  Increasingly, the silence of these places, which are nevertheless so full of movement, has drawn me to them.  They have come to be full of memories, so the drawings and paintings are a result of this continual layering of form and memory, always changing.”

Dana Collins does not work from photographs.  Like all of her landscapes, these were done from direct observation as she worked from a small, light rowboat on the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Speaking of this series, she said, “Then I first began working on the Mississippi, years ago, it was in interest in the effects of light on color, and the interaction of shapes and their reflections that motivated me.  As the sites became more familiar, they came to have personal meaning as well.  Increasingly, the silence of these places, which are nevertheless so full of movement, has drawn me to them.  They have come to be full of memories, so the drawings and paintings are a result of this continual layering of form and memory, always changing.”

Medium and Explanation:  These works are part of a series of landscape paintings in Pastel and Watercolor on archival rag paper.

Dana Collins does not work from photographs.  Like all of her landscapes, these were done from direct observation as she worked from a small, light rowboat on the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Speaking of this series, she said, “Then I first began working on the Mississippi, years ago, it was in interest in the effects of light on color, and the interaction of shapes and their reflections that motivated me.  As the sites became more familiar, they came to have personal meaning as well.  Increasingly, the silence of these places, which are nevertheless so full of movement, has drawn me to them.  They have come to be full of memories, so the drawings and paintings are a result of this continual layering of form and memory, always changing.”