Portrait of Gerard Collins, Strathbutler 2001 (photo by James Wilson)

Gerard Collins (b. 1957, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada) is known for his deft and witty explorations of everyday life. Collins’s style is steeped in art historical references incorporated into his paintings of landscapes, flowers, studio interiors, portraits, and anthropomorphized animals. He is one of Canada’s most prolific contemporary painters. Collins often works in series - setting himself up for work that includes challenges, time frames, boundaries, restrictions, and social endeavors.

Collins did his Foundation Year at St. Martin's School of Art (London, England), and his BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada). As part of his studio degree, he studied with Gerhard Richter at the Dusseldorf Staatliche Kunstakademie (Dusseldorf, West Germany).

Collins has received numerous grants from both ArtsNB and the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the New Brunswick Creation Grant, the Strathbutler Award, a Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation Award, and New Brunswick’s 2005 Miller Brittain Award (now known as the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts).  

Collins’s work can be found in museums and in private and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Owens Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick Museum, University of New Brunswick, Mount St. Vincent University, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Canada Council Art Bank, and the New Brunswick Art Bank.

Selected Writings

“Collins has taken us on, dare I say it, a Romantic and seductive ride through painting. He can be populist in his art. But his can also be a thinking person’s art. He allows us to appreciate his articulation within a cerebral, Postmodern view of art. Given his knowledge of art history, his love of literature, and his ability to communicate an idea both verbally and on canvas, his subject matter speaks with a wide number of entry points. But he lets us off the hook romantically. He absolves our guilt. He redeems us. We can enjoy art again. His most pleasurable work can be perverse. If he subverts anything, it is the Conceptual art idea that, as artists, we all have to be visionaries, shamans, philosophers, or hardcore art-thinkers. With Collins, we are restored to a purely aesthetic experience and forgiven our sins.”

Excerpt from Gerard Collins: Fifty Years of Painting by Robert Barriault with Mary Blatherwick, available from Goose Lane Editions.

“The notion that one thing is a more fitting subject for a painting than another has been a constant bone of contention with Collins. He has used traditional subjects such as the Canadian landscape or still-lives of domestic objects, but has also used Harlequin Romance book covers as source material, as well as the leftovers from his breakfast. He paints from life, and from the imagination, without making any clear distinction between the two. In the end, it is the process that matters, it is the act of making a painting that carries the critical weight. The content lurks amidst the rules within which Collins creates, the structure which gives form to an ongoing, tongue-in-cheek dialogue with his medium and its history.” 

Excerpt from “Gerard Collins: Painting on the “B” Side” by Ray Cronin

“Duchamp, of course, implied that the mechanically reproduced art object could be given “aura” (what he called “a new thought for that object”) by a simple act of nomination, and One Million Pennies ultimately derives from this, but the spectacle of Walter Benjamin stood on his head and copulated with the French maître by a translation of the mechanically reproduced image into an authentic-looking, aura-laden yet inauthentic work is remarkable—for Collins's handling of the paint in this exhibition is of stunning virtuosity—and of course Collins is not, in any sense, a brush-for-hire, but a willing collaborator with Ferguson and has given of his best—nothing else would do—in the service of works rubricated as Ferguson's art.”

Excerpt from Dennis Young,* “Speculate to Appreciate,” Vanguard Magazine, December 1984

*Former Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario; former Chair of the Art History Department at NSCAD.

“In a number of ways, Collins' work of the past ten years is representatively 1980s painting: the work borrows its imagery from the "right" pop sources, like Harlequin Romance cover art, cheap wallpaper patterns, and factory-made paintings sold in shopping malls. The Polke/Salle/Picabia palimpsest painting technique seems right. Collins' arbitrary and deadpan titles bespeak the banal air of an artist raised in the era of Warhol, as does his occasional lapse into garishness and goofiness (like the large painting of a cartoon fish in this exhibition, P.E.I. Landscape with Blue Willow Plates and Fish (Lakeshore Beach).

But most often the program starts to dissolve into the content of the paintings, the beautiful paint handling subverts the banal program, and the arbitrary titles, despite being overly Romantic, transport one into a little reverie….If we associate '80s painting with the work of David Salle, Sigmar Polke, Eric Fischl, and Canadians like Ron Moppet and David Clarkson, then some of Collins' work could certainly find a place amongst it, but the place would be somewhere between the preconceived, arbitrary nature of the statements which initiate the painting and the painting itself. The talent, intuition and knowledge of traditional twentieth century "good" painting which Collins has internalized tends to work against many of the "bad" canons of "true" '80s painting. Very often, Collins is usually able to make the silk purse good painting out of the sow's ear of '80s art.”

Excerpt from Cliff Eyland, “Gerard Collins: Paintings,” published in 1991 as a curatorial essay for an exhibition at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax and then in 1992 in Arts Atlantic 43, Spring/Summer, 28-30.

“If anything, what emerges from Collins’s work that seems to attract his most rabid supporters is the playfulness of ideas that he takes from everything, from art language to literary references to cliches of pop culture to what Cliff Eyland referred to in 1996 as “delicious reverie." It is a collage of everything he knows. As Collins says, “Every time I start to paint, I have five thousand artists in my head.”

Excerpt from Gerard Collins: Fifty Years of Painting by Robert Barriault with Mary Blatherwick, available from Goose Lane Editions.