Jacob Collins (born 1964) started painting at an early age, copying Old Master paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He studied in Europe and attended several art schools in the United States. Collins emerged as one of the leading figures of the newly evolving traditional realist art scene. In the ‘90s, Collins founded the Water Street Atelier, and later the Grand Central Academy of Art (now Grand Central Atelier), which offers four-year full-time residency training in rigorous academic drawing, painting, and sculpting.
Over the years, he has trained many artists in the fundamentals of representational art, helping to foster a new art scene. He believes very much in building a community of artists, new and independent of the institutional avant-garde vision that dominates universities and museums.
“These are two different things, anyway,” Collins said. “Compare it with the music world, where each genre, like classical music and heavy metal for instance, has their independent scene.”
Collins explains why it is difficult for the mainstream art world to embrace this new wave of painters.
“The reverence for and the pursuit of the spirit and aesthetic values of the artists of past centuries seems to make one an oddball artist in today’s art world,” he said. “People might use the awkward description, ’traditional realist' to describe me. But I don’t like that phrase. It didn’t exist in the past—it was just called painting.”
Collins is passionate about what he loves: “I’m trying to make something beautiful in the way the world can be beautiful. It’s something mysterious, really. Trying to capture the poignancy of life ... it’s a lot like poetry. You have to weld together complex and contradictory sensations in order to obtain something beautiful.”
“You have the beauty of the craft, and the beauty of your subject—whatever that subject is. To create the right harmony and tension between craft and subject is a struggle. I struggle to apprehend the world on a deep level and then transform it into a brand new object created through [an artist’s] interaction with the world. It’s a kind of magic I am after.”
Jacob Collins is represented by Adelson Galleries (New York), the John Pence Gallery (San Francisco), and Meredith Long & Co. (Houston). His website is jacobcollinspaintings.com
Wim Van Aalst is a painter based in Belgium.
