Family Fun / Arts & Leisure

Dana Collins creates art in her rowboat

By Times staff | Monday, August 04, 2008 | () comments

"The Lily Pond, Autumn" by Princeton, Ill., artist Dana Collins. Collins' work is on display at the Quad-City Botanical Center in Rock Island through Aug. 28. (Contributed image) Buy this Photo

Princeton, Ill., artist Dana Collins doesn’t use photographs to create her paintings, drawings and sculpture. She takes all of her subjects from direct observation as she works from a small, light rowboat on the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin.

“When I first began working on the Mississippi years ago, it was an interest in the effects of light on color and the interaction of shapes and their reflections that motivated me,” she said in media materials provided by the Quad-City Botanical Center, where her works are on display through the end of August. “As the sites became more familiar, they came to have personal meaning as well. Increasingly, the silence of these places, which are nevertheless so full of movement, has drawn me to them. They have come to be full of memories, so the drawings and paintings are a result of this continual layering of form and memory, always changing.”

Collins will be the guest during a reception Sunday afternoon at the botanical center in Rock Island.