Michael Roque Collins: In the Chama, Where the Spirit Flows

MICHAEL ROQUE COLLINS IN THE CHAMA, WHERE THE SPIRIT FLOWS NOVEMBER 24, 2023 - JANUARY 1, 2024

1613 Paseo de Peralta I Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 I 505.988.3250 I lewallengalleries.com I contact@lewallengalleries.com

MICHAEL ROQUE COLLINS IN THE CHAMA, WHERE THE SPIRIT FLOWS

Michael Roque Collins is an acclaimed master of visual myth and metaphor steeped in rich indeterminate mystery superbly expressed in his decades of extraordinary narrative painting. In a new, yet truly remarkable exploration, Collins has turned to memory-based expressions of the Chama River Valley in Northern New Mexico in a series of expressive oil paintings that transmit spiritual energies of the landscape. As works made from memory, these new paintings possess a quality of enigmatic perplexity, not unlike that of many of Collins’ narrative paintings.

Beguiling ambiguity is one of Collins’ great aesthetic hallmarks and its presence in these new landscapes is no surprise. It not only infuses the new work with a signature relationship to Collins’ larger oeuvre, but also immediately distinguishes these vivid works from Chama Canyon landscape paintings of a more ordinary variety.

Within his enormous and extraordinary body of narrative painting, the subject and idea of landscape has also occupied a particularly important place for Collins, one in which past and present coexist in the rich forever of earth, forest, rock, river, and sky. He has long derived enormous psychic and artistic energy from the earth. Even when Collins leaves a place, there remains a potency of its energy, a sacred part of its geometry, and a spiritual impact of its totemic meaning in his memory. He has often written and spoken about a kind of profound residue that persists in his painting that animates its authenticity and power.

For Collins, memory is thus the connective nexus between those realms – past and present - and in his new series of paintings entitled, In the Chama, Where the Spirit Flows, Collins delves deeply toward the rawest kind of connection, the kind he finds in nature’s insuperable potency. From remembered times of being present in lightning storms and monsoonal rains sweeping across the Chama River Valley, or the stark flint rock canyon walls and organic swellings of crumbled mesas spilled beneath them, Collins finds intense spiritual energy and inspiration that he imparts to these vibrant new paintings.

Jagged fingers of burning red explode onto some of these canvases as he remembers the sun setting into impossibly blue skies at a day’s end in Chama – colors he uses so intensely that any fauvist would feel fatal envy. This chromatic demonstration continues in various ways throughout the new series to great effect.

In an understatement, Collins describes it as follows: “My hues are not intended as solely naturalistic or realistically descriptive, though are more expressive and reflective of my memories, based upon large amounts of time spent in New Mexico.”

It is this time spent in Chama that so powerfully activates Collins’ memory and pulls at his emotions and imagination welling up from the land. Art critic Jim Edwards has said that Collins addresses landscapes with both a poetic, as well as spiritual vision. He writes, “Time and memory infuse Collins’ art. The suggestion of time in collision—the continuous time of the natural world juxtaposed to the relatively short time of human life—gives Collins’ landscapes an aura of time suspended yet constantly in flux.”

Collins’ Chama Valley series tell a pictorial story of the mysteries of this place, where dramatically hued skies and suddenly furious storms collide. His paintings are an interplay that, in his words, are where “sky moves into ground and ground gives way to the heavens.” This is where, in Collins’ mind and memory, as well as in his heart and brain, heaven and earth move. This phrenic temblor erupts onto his canvases in a seismic intensity of color and energetic brushstroke that exaggerates and distinguishes the spectacle of landforms, bodies of water, and sky and clouds, which together comprise Collins’ utterly unique interpretation of the Chama River Valley.

Or said another way, from the interaction through memory of Collins’ time spent there with the functioning of his mythic mind, the artist creates a remarkable pastiche of imagery that transcends conscious intent and evolves into levels of unconscious meanings resonating the spiritual energy from the topography, colors, light, and weather of this place that have drawn painters, writers, mystics, and theologians to it.

In the dauntlessness of Collins’ expressive depictions of the Chama River Valley, there is a sense of contemporary artistic courage reminiscent of that of the early 20 th century Northern New Mexico painters first encountering the majesty of this landscape. Like many of them, Collins allows the spiritual energy of the setting sun and the rushing waters of the Chama Valley to manifest in the form of the colors on his canvases. In his interpretations, they rise into explosions of oranges, reds, and yellows, as exemplified in his major new works entitled Leaving Chama I and Building Before Sunset, for example.

Collins’ sense of cleansing and spiritual uplifting also adhere in these new works from the time spent on the riverbanks in the Chama Valley. Collins has long seen water as one of nature’s most redemptive elements — allegorically as well as literally — and certainly no less so in this new series. Here in paintings entitled Red Sky over the Chama River, Breaking Through, Mountain Stream, and Morning Light, the reflection of sun on water suggests the convergence of animating force and cleansing power, together for Collins suggesting an ultimate kind of baptismal sacrament of nature. He describes this as follows: “To be in water, even when one is only fly fishing as I have been since early childhood, or wading in the flowing rivers waters of the Chama, one senses the mysteries and secrets of nature strong and profound that bathe you as you stand … Looking at these paintings I hope the viewer feels the energy released from the meditative memories of the fluid world here so capable of cleansing.”

In sum, when one confronts these remarkable paintings by Collins, the observations made by noted art historian Charles Eldredge about the landscape ideas and paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove years before in similar New Mexico topography come to mind and seem apt for Collins as well: “[They] transported themselves from the mundane plane to a God’s-eye view, witnessing the world wheeling in the infinite.” And very much like them, Collins, in this series of paintings, “[seeks] to capture the vital essences of nature, a unity of micro and macro, of man and universal spirit.”

— Kenneth R. Marvel

Setting Beyond Chama, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 30 x 80 inches 4

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Castle Walls, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 50 x 40 inches 6

Falling Mesa, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 40 x 50 inches 7

Approaching Storm, 2022-23 Oil on paper on board, 15 x 20 inches 8

Candice's Mountain, 2022-23 Oil on paper on board, 20 x 15 inches 9

Castle Walls, 2022-23 Watercolor on paper, 12.5 x 9.75 inches 10

Falling Mesa, 2022-23 Watercolor on paper, 9.75 x 12.75 inches 11

Cerro Perdernal, 2022-23 Watercolor on paper, 9.75 x 14 inches 12

Cerro Pedernal - Flint Mountain, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches 13

Building Before Sunset, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 50 x 40 inches 14

Breaking Through, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 40 x 30 inches 15

Along the Trail, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 20 x 15 inches 16

Beneath the Monastery, 2022-23 Oil on paper on board, 15 x 20 inches 17

Leaving Chama I, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 52 x 50 inches 18

Leaving Chama II, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 52 x 50 inches 19

Canones, 2022-23 Oil on paper on board, 15 x 20 inches 20

Gallina, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches 21

Passing Storm, 2022-23 Watercolor on paper, 14.25 x 10 inches 22

Plaza Blanca, 2022-23 Oil on paper on board, 15 x 20 inches 23

Lone White Cloud, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 30.25 x 40 inches 24

Setting Sun over the Chama River, 2022-23 Oil on paper on board, 17.75 x 20 inches 25

Red Sky Over the Chama River, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches 26

Mountain Stream, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 30 x 22 inches 27

MICHAEL ROQUE COLLINS B. 1955 in HOUSTON, TEXAS EDUCATION 1998

1984

1978 1963-73

1960

Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, MFA in Painting University of Houston, Houston, TX, Post Baccalaureate Studies in Drawing/Painting University of Houston, Houston, TX, BFA Lowell Collins School of Art, Houston, TX Museum of Fine Arts Art School, Houston, TX

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2023 In the Chama, Where the Spirit Flows,

LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe NM 2021 Transmissions of Light, LewAllen Galleries,

Santa Fe, NM Salon Prive, Preview of the Transmissions

of Light Series, presented by LewAllen

Galleries + Houston Baptist University,

Houston, TX 2019 Salon Prive, Preview of The Reliquaries Series, presented by LewAllen Galleries at

Saint Street Studio, Houston, TX Reliquaries Series, LewAllen Galleries,

Santa Fe, NM 2018 Paintings and Works on Paper of Michael

Roque Collins - 1988-2018, Clark &

Associates, Houston, TX 2017 Tides of Memory, McMurray University,

Abilene, TX Salon Prive, Preview of The Inland

Mountain Journey Series, Presented by

LewAllen Galleries at Saint Street Studio,

Houston, TX Inland Mountain Journey, LewAllen

Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2016 Works on Paper, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2015 The Venetian Series, LewAllen Galleries,

Santa Fe, NM Salon Prive, Preview of The Venetian Series, presented by LewAllen Galleries at

Saint Street Studio, Houston, TX 2013 Beyond Earth’s Rhythm, LewAllen Galleries

at the Railyard, Santa Fe, NM 2011 Tides of Memory, LewAllen Galleries at the

Railyard, Santa Fe, NM 2010 Shadowlands, Richard Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

2009 From Ruins to Resurrection, LewAllen

Galleries at the Railyard, Santa Fe, NM

UAC Gallery (curated by Jim Edwards),

HBU, Houston, TX 2008 Sojourn In the Shadowlands, G Gallery,

Houston, TX Sacred Landscapes, Felipe Cossio del

Pomar Cultural Center, San Isidro, Lima, Peru Sojourn in the Shadowlands,

Munchskirche Museum, Salzweddel, Germany 2007 Memory Gardens, LewAllen Contemporary

Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Sacred Landscapes, Gerald Peters

Galleries Dallas, Dallas, TX Ritual of Memory, G Gallery, Houston TX 2006 Solo Survey, Montgomery College Art Center 2005 Forum Rituals, Corpus Christi Art Center,

Corpus Christi, TX 2004 Recent Works of Michael Roque Collins,

Bacardi Museum, Santiago, Cuba A Ritual of Memory, LewAllen

Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM Tropological Landscapes, Ellen Noel Art

Museum, Odessa, TX. 2003 Gardens of Mystery, Gallery 101 in

conjunction with Red Bud Gallery,

Houston, TX Sacred & Profane Spaces, Redbud Gallery,

Houston, TX 2001 Retrospective solo exhibition, University of

Saint Thomas Gallery, Houston, TX 2000 Michael Roque Collins, Edith Baker

Gallery, Dallas, TX 1999 Retrospective Solo Exhibition, Houston Art

League, Retrospective Solo Exhibition,

Houston, TX Gardens of Terrible Beauty, Virginia Miller

Gallery, Coral Gables, FL 1998 Brookhaven College, Dallas, Texas 1997 Lowell Collins Gallery, Houston, TX 1996 Sacred & Profane Spaces, Virginia Miller

Gallery, Coral Gables, FL 1995 McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, TX 1994 C. G. Jung Center, Houston, TX 1993 McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, TX 1991 McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, TX 1990 McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, TX 1989 Jung Center, Houston, TX

Framboyan Gallery, New Orleans, LA

McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, TX 1987 Hooks-Epstein Galleries, Inc., Houston, TX 1986 Hooks-Epstein Galleries, Inc., Houston, TX 1983 Hooks-Epstein Galleries, Inc., Houston, TX

Passing Storm, 2022-23 Oil on linen, 50 x 40 inches 29

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