Patrick Collins HRHA, (1911 - 1994) Flowerpiece (1956) Oil on board, 46 x 61cm (18 x 24'') Signed Provenance: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, at which exhibition it was purchased by Sir Basil...

Patrick Collins HRHA, (1911 - 1994) Flowerpiece (1956) Oil on board, 46 x 61cm (18 x 24'') Signed Provenance: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, at which exhibition it was purchased by Sir Basil Goulding - thence by family descent Literature: Frances Ruane: Patrick Collins, Arts Council 1982, Catalogue No. 11 as ''Vase, Still life'' Patrick Collins was born in 1910 in the small village of Dromore West in Co. Sligo. The cluster of two pubs and a few houses lies in the green prosperous heart of the parish which on one side loses itself in the mournful bogs which climb the slopes of the Ox mountains, while on the other, small farms shelter from the Atlantic. It is the kind of country that feeds the imagination. He came to Dublin to be educated by the Christian Brothers but early took an interest in painting, attending classes at the National College of Art, and painting in the evenings and at weekends. As the intoxication grew, he devoted himself completely to painting. His work is in all the public and private collections that presume to be comprehensive. He represented Ireland at the International Guggenheim Exhibition in 1958.His subject matter is conventional; landscape sometimes of the town but, more often of fields, hills, white houses in the evening light, cattle standing in a pasture, some still lives of fruit or flowers, a few nudes. But these are really only points of departure for Collins, whose procedures in evolving the painting owe something to the influences of Hone, Paul Henry (to whom he has painted a 'homage') and above all Jack Yeats. For just as the last used a long garnered store of memories for his later work so also Collins paints not the actual subject, but the built-up accretion of emotion and feeling that have gathered about the remembered scene. But while Yeats remained essentially an illustrator and painted events, Collins' expression is completely visual and all his best work is the result of a visual experience. He has said ''It is the aura of an object which interests him more than the object. I see a few bottles on a table and I feel there is more than a few bottles. It is this something more that I try to paint''. W. B. Yeats once said that when he was abroad and remembered Ireland or wished to remind himself of it, it was always, the West of Ireland he imagined. Collins shares this preoccupation with the West and his seeming indifference to all international influences contribute to making him the completely Irish painter that he is. But because he is non-literary he succeeds in transcending this provincialism of place and while familiarity with his chosen landscape can provide an extra dimension to one's enjoyment of his work, lack of this knowledge in no way diminishes it.Thus Collins's painting is allusive; he seems to search in the tangled web of brushstrokes and pigment, shade and tone, for an evanescent, half remembered but deeply felt experience; the forms and images of the painting emerge from the basic colour or tonality, sometimes fleetingly as one's perceptions change. For his colour is really a development of tone with a carefully controlled gamut based on an impalpable shifting grey, built up from an impasto of repeated paint layers. Muted it is, but since there is practically no line, it serves to carry the painting; it gives the necessary reference but not so as to interfere with the core of the work; the 'something more' he has spoken of. Collins's work epitomises very clearly the virtues and perhaps the deficiencies of Irish Painting; the tentative, allusive, thoroughly romantic, it can express feeling and sensibility in the only way these can be sensed and that fully. Cold perception, the arrow of reason, great constructs of composition, we must I fear leave to other lands, other peoples. Poussin we can only appreciate.The paintings of Patrick Collins are like pearls, rich and glowing, that have dropped opalescent from the shells of memory and dream which nurtured them.Desmond MacAvock.

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