GUS Visiting Artist: Charlotte Collins '14
On display in the Johnson Gallery in Lower School
Charlotte Collins is an artist, a student, a municipal employee, and an aspiring urban planner. They graduated from Glen Urquhart in 2014 and attended since Kindergarten. Charlotte explores how identity is held in the objects we hold dear and left behind with the objects we lose or discard. Their art is an ode to the resilience of human kindness, care, and joy. They are currently in the Master of Regional Planning at UMass-Amherst and employed in the Assessor’s Department at the Town of Hadley. They live with their partner, Colin, their Great Dane, Pasta, and their tuxedo cat, Cricket.
Artist Statement
“I paint out of an urgency to transcribe. Color is how I experience much of life: a moment of good light, changing weather, a melancholy day that still fills my chest with gratitude, a cobweb clearing first sip of coffee, dirt on my hands, different light moving across the same walls. Color is nostalgic, it is how I place my memories in context. Color is aspirational; a constant and addictive pursuit. Sometimes I paint with a bursting energy to get the color out of my mind and onto a surface. Other times the colors fight once outside my head and I have to wrestle with them on paper to find balance. Repetitive shapes, texture and layers all build on each other and push the work forward. Recognizable forms along with loose symbols of my own interpretation remain visible in the composition.
As my children grow and the grip of early motherhood is loosening I am pulled toward painting even more. Two conflicting tethers, it is a burden and a privilege to be both mother and a painter. Recently I am working to incorporate more narrative into the work. I have been exploring the ways that a specific scene, painted either from life or memory can direct the color and energy in a painting. The moments of exhaustion and rage and repetition and humor are interesting to me as a subject and using these focused narratives gives the process room for new color combinations and forms to show up unexpectedly.
Though a moment of color or an amusing scene from my life are usually the inspiration for jumping in, once I begin a painting, rather than working from an image or plan, each decision informs the next. I aim to translate my experience in the world, and attempt to connect to someone else’s experience. “