Mississippi moves Collins to create
Art instructor N. Dana Collins will be showing new work at the Prairie Arts Center in Princeton during November. An opening reception, from 7 to 9 p.m. Nov. 4, is open to the public.
A series of 20 pastel landscape studies captures the light and reflections of sites on the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin, where Collins works each summer.
"When I first began working on the Mississippi, years ago, it was an interest in the effects of light on color and the interaction of forms and reflections that motivated me," she said. "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," she continued.
"They have come to be full of memories, of the voices of people who have been there with me; so the drawings are a result of this continual layering of form and memory, always changing."
Collins has exhibited her paintings, drawings, and sculpture in over four dozen solo and group exhibitions in New York, Florida, and throughout New England and the Midwest.
Her numerous awards include the Sisselman Award from the Berkshire Museum and the Sculptor's Guild Competition in New York. She is Midwest Regional Studio Art Consultant for the College Board in Princeton, New Jersey.