Paul Collins is an artist, curator, and educator from Nashville, TN. Paul makes paintings, drawings and sculpture that combine humor, tactility and observation to examine the world. A self proclaimed tree hugger, Collins never met a vine he didn’t enjoy killing. Paul has an MFA from Yale University and has been a resident at Skowhegan, Anderson Ranch Arts Center and the Vermont Studio Center. His work has been featured in New American Paintings, Art Voices, Fresh Paint Magazine, and has been exhibited across the US. Paul teaches at Austin Peay State University.

I am a diarist artist, and for the past 20 years I have used my daily personal, psychological and familial experiences as a framework to speak most directly about meaning, vitality, mortality, love and the texture of human interaction. Trouble at work? Let’s start there and make a drawing and sketch the problem out in space… 

I work across a variety of media but the process is consistent: drawing, photographing and writing daily; developing built environments or layered painted surfaces from the drawings and developing staged scenes from the photos and writing; locating a nexus of meaning or axis of connection upon which to build a narrative; girding the mixed elements around these found axes of meaning... And so it goes iteratively. Regardless of media, each work aims to articulate meaning through its image as well as the rigor and process of its becoming. This process celebrates the narrative of every day. I am devoted to these constructions as the most engaging way to internalize, examine and tell these stories of humor, hustle, married life, crazy babies, employment, coping, jealousy and trouble.