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 storyteller, and for 30 years I have used my daily experiences as a framework to speak most directly about meaning, vitality, mortality, love, and the texture of human interaction. Following the lead of my favorite artists and writers, I believe my best chance to communicate with my audience is through intimate true stories of lived experience. My subject matter has evolved over time from a personal diaristic approach to a more open, exploratory, and community-based journalism where my story joins a chorus of others’ experiences.

In recent years, I’ve become fascinated with the structure of the book as a natural vehicle for these picture stories as well as an exciting analog to self-knowledge: a format that reveals and then hides its content as one moves through the sequence of pages, yet builds a larger structure in the mind of the viewer. The form of the book combines an intriguing mix of contrasting properties: openness and concealment; immateriality and heft; sequential limitation and the promise of experiential fulfillment when the last page is read. It is helpful that books are such an accessible and cherished form. And it is essential to recognize that their strengths -portability, accessibility, thrift -are exactly what make them both endangered and dangerous, or as Stephen King put it, "uniquely portable magic".