Gerard Collins: Fifty Years of Painting by Robert Barriault with Mary Blatherwick

The art of Gerard Collins resists categorisation. Over a 50-year career, Collins’s conceptual imagination and dizzying array of influences has produced a body of work as eclectic as it is stimulating. His oeuvre, ranging from still lifes to landscapes, from realism to neo-conceptualism, remains undeniably embedded in Saint John, while partaking in — and pushing against — national and international conversations about art and theory.

“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.

Add to this his ability to articulate or synthesize both large and small ideas on canvas, and he delivers an emotional impact through his evocation of personal experience, one his viewer can easily assimilate. In plain English, he makes the local universal.”

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