Collins art exhibit on display
Dana Collins' exhibit of recent pastel landscape drawings and watercolors will be on display in the B gallery through May 15.
The works are part of a series the art instructor based on sites in the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Collins said she did them all from observation at the sites, not from photographs.
"Most were made from a small, light rowboat, in back sloughs on the upper Mississippi," she said.
Working on site posed a challenge, Collins said, because most of the works took more than one day to complete.
"Returning to the same place, when the weather conditions, wind, time of day were the same was always a challenge," she said. "Usually I take several unfinished drawings out with me each morning, hoping for the best, and some fresh blank paper, just in case."
To help explain the locations which appear in her work, Collins pasted together a series of satellite images and has included that in her exhibit.
Collins, who teaches drawing, painting and art history, holds a B.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in New York. She has studied painting and studio art at Yale University, Columbia College, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and the University of Tennessee.
Her work has been exhibited in New York at the Brooklyn Museum, the Sculptor's Guild, and the Pratt Manhattan Center; in New England at the Berkshire Museum, the Becket Art Center, the Art Gallery of Boston and in numerous galleries in Florida and the Midwest.
She is Regional Studio Art Consultant for the Advanced Placement Program of the Educational Testing Service and is a Reader in Studio Art for The College Board in Princeton, New Jersey.
The Apache April 29, 1999