Artist Profile: Jim Collins

By Nick McGregor

Looking out from the second-floor Davis Shores workspace of local artist Jim Collins, the waterways of Salt Run and the St. Augustine Inlet loom large. True to the area’s name, a salty breeze blows incessantly, seagulls squabble on the way to and from meals, and the airhorn affixed to the Bridge Of Lions sounds ominously in the distance. It’s the perfect environment for Collins to pursue his dichotomous art: marine creatures — mostly fish, turtles, and waterbirds in various states of graphic decay — depicted on manmade materials like drywall and scrap wood. Collins invited Drift into his studio to talk industrial art, endeavors in Georgia, and the ocean’s inspiration.
Drift: You’ve got a lot of wood here in your workspace.

Jim Collins: I use a lot of different materials, but I like wood the most because I like working with tools. I guess you could call it industrial art, but I think it’s more a standard way of building things. I try to incorporate industrial materials into my concepts to show the relationship between man and nature, and those materials represent that relationship between man and how he destroys or takes over the natural world for its resources. And living by the water, most of my work revolves around those themes. I just find it interesting to portray those themes on materials that man extracts from nature.

D: So why the focus on aquatic animals?

JC: I’ve narrowed it down to the one environment that I’m attracted to. I like trees and mountains and everything, but I love fishing, I love the ocean, and I’m completely fascinated by the estuaries and the marshes and the birds. Most of my work is directly taken from something I’ve seen or experienced right out here in my backyard at Salt Run. All of the fish I draw, I’ve caught. Or even the dead beached whale — I’ve seen that here on the beach.

D: In addition to wood, you use drywall a lot, right?
JC: I use drywall because it’s very industrial — we use it for the inner finish of our walls and ceilings, but it’s a very fragile material. If we don’t take care of it in our home, it’s pretty much ruined. It’s like the ecosystem in a sense. If you take a fish out of water, it dies pretty quickly, and if you put drywall in water, it’s destroyed pretty quickly, too. I was fascinated with that for a while.

D: What originally inspired your artistic streak?
JC: My grandmother was a watercolor landscape painter, but the earliest stuff I can ever remember drawing was with two brothers who are now comic book artists, Seth and Clay Mann. We used to draw Marvel cards everyday when we came home from school — Wolverine, Sabertooth, Silver Surfer. When I got older, that wasn’t really my thing, but as I got more involved with the beach and fishing, all these things overlapped. Sometimes I’d go to the beach, sometimes I’d go fishing, and sometimes I’d create artwork, but when I was making artwork I was thinking about fishing or surfing.

I went to Flagler and got a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree, and dabbled in everything — black-and-white photography, sculpture, drawing and painting classes. But there wasn’t much of a conceptual thrust there. It was very old-fashioned; I remember doing drawings based on early modernism and proportion, value and shading, whereas today things have become really conceptual and technological. Then I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design, where we had to have a central focus, so I honed it all in on my personal experiences with nature. Conceptualism was introduced, and what I got from the deal was an awareness of contemporary technology. So to make work like mine is to refuse to switch to that level of advancement. It’s a way of slowing it down a little bit, I guess.

D: In addition to the wood and the drywall, you work with a lot of power tools, as well.

JC: When I was in grad school at SCAD I spent most of my time in the woodshop building stuff from leftover scrap wood. I love working with saws and staple guns and hammers, having sawdust flying all around and the smell of different woods in the air. I get that from my dad, because he’s always been in the construction field. I grew up watching him build our house and fix anything you brought to him.

D: What kinds of exhibits, shows, or residencies have you taken part in?
JC: Right now I have a show at the Harris House Gallery, which is part of the Atlantic Center For The Arts in New Smyrna Beach. It’s up until February 26th. I was also in a group show at Hollingsworth Gallery in Palm Coast called “Big-Uns,” where I displayed IVM, my 20-foot-long barge piece with tape cranes. I also had my thesis show, “Fragility Of Stability,” in Savannah, but the residency I did last October at The Hambidge Center in North Georgia was my first big break. I received a stipend and a grant from the government to go way up in the mountains, where I had a whole two-story house with a studio to myself for two weeks. It was very solitary, so you could sit there, think, focus, and work. And if you got frustrated or needed a break, you could walk out the back door and onto a trail into the mountains.

D: Have you had success selling any of your work, even though most of it is so large in scale?

JC: No, it’s been a long time for me. I sold a few of the small charcoal fish drawings at my thesis show last year, but I wasn’t trying to. A lot people don’t have disposable income for art right now, and the gallery scene is very interesting [laughs]. I tried to get involved in it, but it’s strange how people just come for the spectacle and the glass of wine. And a lot of galleries want to take a 40-50% commission. I make my work for other people to look at, but I like to look at it and enjoy it myself. Some stuff, I could care less if anyone ever sees.

D: So you’re not paying all the bills with your artwork, huh?

JC: You can’t pay any bills doing art right now — but you can’t stop yourself from doing it, either. People do all the time, though; I went to school with a lot of people who did. There’s just not a huge demand to come paint a picture of your house or your family anymore. It’s sad.

D: You’ve also dabbled in wood relief, right?

JC: The best thing about the wood relief was it allowed me to break away from simply painting on canvas. I got this RotoZip router/jigsaw hybrid for Christmas one year, and I started layering wood and making different kinds of surfaces to paint on. It made me feel comfortable jumping into other stuff — I wasn’t afraid to try different materials, even if they were complete failures. But it was difficult because the image had to be perfect.

D: Your current work is very stark, particularly the marlin doused in oil.

JC: Lately a lot of my work has been in black and white. I don’t know if I’m going to stick with that or not, but I find something intriguing about black-and-white painting. It’s old school, it’s resisting color-enhanced technology… it’s cathartic for me. It also allows me to add more depth and provoke more thoughts in people when they look at my paintings. The woodcuts were so straightforward and representational, but when you look at the dead whale in Disjunction, you get so many different things. It’s too bad that my thesis show couldn’t have been here in St. Augustine, because I think it would have been more at home in a community like this.

D: Even though that work and many others are so graphic?

JC: Everything’s graphic in my work. That quality is something that makes people have an uncomfortable feeling, not just a joyous experience. It goes a little deeper; that emotional aspect has to stick in the gut a little bit. Then that triggers something in the brain, and then you can’t look at it all from one viewpoint. That’s my objective — to make people think about man’s interaction with the environment. It has to be a little bit cruel; you have to show the ugly side of it. But I’m not a dark guy [laughs]. I’m the total opposite — I love turtles and fish and birds and everything.

D: Did your time in Georgia drive you away from the saltwater ethos?

JC: Actually, I think that’s what brought me closer to it. I lived here for so many years, and then I moved abruptly to the heart of Savannah. My studio was in the industrial part of town, under the bridge by the river and right next to huge factories and plants and cranes. I’d walk by there every day, hearing the forklifts, smelling the industry, seeing the barges, and thinking of what that must have done to the whole area —pollution, runoff, extraction. Then when I’d come home, the first thing I’d do is go straight to the water — I had to be close to it. Being in Northwest Georgia made me yearn for the water; it’s beautiful up there, but I felt so detached. The leaves were changing, but I just wanted to come home and go fishing. I think it’s important to be connected to your surroundings. And as hard as it is to live here, I love it. It’s a great place to be and a great place to work. It’s just hard to balance life, work, art, family, friends, and having a good time.

D: Do you go fishing as a good time or as R&D for your work?
JC: A little of both — I was going through a period when I didn’t know what to paint, and one day I went fishing to take my mind off of it. But I snagged a turtle — foul-hooked it in the flipper. It wasn’t bad; it only lasted about two minutes before I managed to bring the turtle up, get the hook out, and release it. But I got to hold the turtle, so I started thinking about it. Then I painted the turtle, and through the painting I learned more. Became more educated. I spent time painting every little mark on it; I learned its features, and then I read about its migration, how many of that species existed, and which ones were endangered. It was an all-around educational experience. The painting turned out to be something deeper and more emotional. It’s not a happy turtle, because it reflected the feelings I had and reflected me personally. If the painting could look back, it would see me there somewhere. If you could look through the eyes of the fish that I’ve painted — and I’ve caught every one — they would see me. The dead whale would see me. The turtle, the pelican, the barge, they would all see me. It’s kind of strange. I’ve tried other things to see if I could move away from it, and it always comes back around to something related directly to an experience I had right here by the ocean.