BIO “I paint like a sculptor, moving, adding, and scraping paint around the canvas, resulting in striking contours made of heavy opaque color and texture against a thin, filmy transparency.” Joan Maureen Collins is an expressive abstract painter living and working in Scottsdale, Arizona. She has been a painter for twenty-eight years and a professional artist for twenty years. Joan studied art at Scottsdale Community College, Scottsdale Artist School and is an alumnus of the Creative Visionary Program. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Arizona and across the country. Joan has been featured in the Phoenix Art Museum's Artist Spotlight program. She recently showed her works Art Basel, Switzerland in May 2023. In 2022, her paintings were featured at the SCOPE Miami Contemporary Art Fair in Miami, FL and exhibits in New York City in 2022 and 2023. Her work has been accepted into numerous juried exhibits across the country, most recently in Texas. She has also exhibited internationally, including in Ireland, where she held sold-out shows. Her paintings are held in numerous private collections in Arizona, across the country, and internationally. Joan’s observations of the natural world, and the inspiration she receives from spending time in nature, have been a driving force behind her creativity. Her powerful and soulful abstract interpretations of these impressions of the land remind us of the fragility of our natural world. In a recent series, titled Entangled Beauty, the artist hones in on the contrasts she has observed. Joan’s creation of Entangled Beauty included “painting” empty canvases by washing them in Traligagh Bay in Toe Head, Ireland. Back in her Arizona studio, the unrolled canvases revealed dried impressions of water, seaweed and the organic inks she had applied. She interpreted those works by adding abstract strokes, while purposely leaving haunting traces of our fragile world on the canvas. The artist often invents her own painting tools from found materials such as feathers and sticks which were used in the creation of Entangled Beauty.​​ARTIST STATEMENT​“For the past twenty years, I have had the privilege of working as a renewable energy expert. Through this challenging position, I have traveled the globe, gaining expertise and discussing the future of Mother Earth with fellow colleagues. From this vantage point, I indulged in the diversity of the landscape, comprehended the earth’s fragility, and felt the allure of its beauty. My memories from wandering the world are seared in my mind and soul. These soulful impressions seep through my canvases like negatives processed in a dark room. Abstraction is the visual language in which I express my love for nature. This extends to revealing the gripping essence of natural and urban landscapes in abstract form. My passion for nature and the environment is also reflected in my painting process where I often invent my own painting tools from found materials such as feathers, branches, cactus spines, and more. I create my work in a series, where each painting coalesces around a theme. The series are titled to invite openness, and I create each body of work with no agenda, mission, or statement; to share the creative impressions from my life’s journey and to paint on the canvas what has been written on my soul. As such, I invite the viewer into my world, the worlds that I have visited, and my interpretations of them. Finally, and after extensive layering of materials, the painting will reveal itself and the artistic adventure is done. My soul soars, my mind is emptied, and I know it is complete. Then on to my next creative journey...”