Overview
Jonathan Collins began his lifelong quest of creating art at the age of 3, when handed a pencil and pad. Throughout his childhood, drawing consumed him as he created hundreds of charcoal portraits of 1930’s movie stars. In 1987, Collins began using watercolors, and soon developed his own vision and concepts, studying the techniques of Albrecht Durer, Johannes van Eyck, and other early Flemish and Dutch master painters.
Collins received a full scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1988, and then he received the first of two Elizabeth Greenshields grants (a private Arts Foundation in Quebec, Canada) in 1990 and in 1992. Collins, while on his aesthetic journey, traveled throughout North America and Europe immersing himself in baroque art and architecture.
In 2013, the Paterson Museum in New Jersey displayed a one-man exhibit of Collins’ work called THE BEAT TRAVELER series, featuring landscape paintings of key Beat Generation locales, including: Paterson, New Jersey, Lowell , Massachusetts, and San Francisco, California.
Since 2023, Collins has been working on the BEAT and COUNTERCULTURE PORTRAIT Series – paintings of writers from the 1940’s – 1970’s period, spawned directly from the creative movement founded by Lowell’s own native son, Jack Kerouac.
