Anthony Collins:
What Remains
Anthony Collins called New York home. A city of crowded streets, passing faces, and people carrying more than they show. Life happens at close range there: the noise, the friction, the small kindnesses that can go unnoticed. Thousands of separate worlds moving through the same few blocks.
There’s a distance between being surrounded by people and feeling that you belong. In New York, that distance can exist across a kitchen table or in a crowded subway car. A familiar face does not mean a familiar story. There is what people show the world, and everything that remains beneath the surface.
Artist Stories
That tension offers one way into Collins’s paintings. Faces emerge from layered surfaces. Figures seem to hold their ground against everything happening around them. Bright color sits beside something harder to name. There can be unease, an odd humor, a feeling of being surrounded and somehow still alone. These are impressions the work makes possible, rather than explanations it demands.
The color may catch your attention first. Then an expression holds it. A figure that seemed incidental becomes central; a crowded passage begins to resolve into separate encounters. You find yourself looking from one face to another, wondering about the space between them. The paintings leave room for that curiosity—and for discoveries the artist may never have intended.
Since 2015, Collins has lived and painted in Bennington, Vermont. His work has been exhibited in New York City, Woodstock, New York, Portland, Maine, and Vermont. It appeared on the cover of issue four of FROM: Outsider Art Magazine and has been featured in Artist Portfolio Magazine.
At Mercer & Pine, we are drawn to the way his paintings remain open, even as they become familiar. They have a presence that takes time to know. Seen across a room, the color establishes itself first. Up close, a face or an unexpected detail gives you a reason to stay.
Living with the work allows that encounter to continue. You pass a painting in the morning, return to it at night. An expression you overlooked begins to matter. Something that once felt uneasy becomes unexpectedly companionable.
The painting hasn’t changed. But sometimes it meets you differently.