| Martin Collins |
Gallery |
Erotic Temple |
Martin Collins was born in 1964 and grew up in the countryside between Salisbury plain and ”Stonehenge” and the river valleys of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. He went on to study Fine Art (specializing in Painting) at Portsmouth University. He then spent 2 years in an Artist’s Studio Group in Bristol before re-locating to Barcelona, Spain where he exhibited his oil and collage/mixed media paintings for nearly a decade. Invited to an ‘Artist’s Residency’ in New York in 1998 he lived and worked there showcasing his oil and mixed media in Soho N.Y., Brooklyn ,Williamsburg, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and contributing critic to the N.Y Arts Magazine. He came to Thailand in 2000 in the desire to take a break from the N.Y Art Scene and frenetic, fabulous but intense pressure and expense of New York, to think and re-think what he had learned and painted there (he hoped) from a new, “Asian” perspective, and produce a fresh body of work to go back to New York : a better artist. He has been here 6 years now and has started a family, with a 3 yr old daughter. In Thailand he has produced a large body of work in painting and collage (Exhibitions :Rangsit University, Siam Art-space, /Thavibu Gallery) and increasingly in, large-scale Photography and printing techniques: where he explores the poetic and painterly possibilities of Bangkok Architecture and it’s shifting phantasmic details. His photography culminated in his recent exhibition “Architectural : Animisms “(Nov. 2005) with which he shows that Bangkok is a feast of primeval colors and feeling , in a thick soup of cultural, architectural and painterly delights. His best work in Thailand has been attempting to deal with the artistic, cultural and personal roller coasters of his own career trajectory and changing environment; of a fluid East and West, and the disparities of form between the ancient and modern, the urban and Jungle, of the cultural “Babylon” set against the impersonal, raw colour, earth, soil, sky and mad fecundity of the land of the Thais. Below is a selection of his limited edition large-scale prints. To see wider views and more details of the buildings or contexts from which he has found these images, please go to Building Project I and II and III.