I've been working on The Ocean Series for more than a quarter of a century. I guess you could say that this conflation of a traditional marine sunset with a color-field painting, something that originally crossed my mind sometime back in 1978, has turned out to be a fairly fertile idea for me. Call it a post-modern approach to the color-field tradition if you like, but I'm not trying to deconstruct anything, fit into any category, or prove any theories. The ocean, with its infinite variety and constant flux, is a motif that never ceases to fascinate me; and to say that this image of the far horizon and the dying sunlight has broad metaphoric powers would be to belabor the obvious. My two greatest influences as a painter have been Mark Rothko and Claude Monet; in a way, my paintings are only a kind of simple-minded formal synthesis of the two. At least, I hope they're that good.
Thanks for looking, and for the kind words. Brian Sherwin, senior contributing editor for MyArtSpace.com, interviewed me this month; you can read it at http://www.myartspace.com/interviews/interviews/art-space-talk-carson-collins.html
Peace, Love,
Carson
Thank you for the kind words. It's always good to know that someone out there
"gets it", my career although long (I've been doing The Ocean Series for 28
years now) has not been enormously remunerative. It's a lonely path.
What did I was just sit and stare at the ocean for thousands of hours plus I
surfed and went out on boats every chance I got. But the main thing was to
sit and contemplate the ocean, I mean real mystical style contemplation in a
trance state. And I made sketches, reams of pencil sketches on newsprint
pads with circles and arrows and notes about the way the patterns on the
water were formed and changed and the colors.
You or anyone could do the same thing it just requires a sort of monomania
that most people don't have or want. I mean I literally spent my entire life
for this. But in the end I did manage to produce a few paintings that have
the quality of something much loved and long remembered, and that's perhaps
what some people like you see in them.
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keep it up,pls :3