Brendan Collins
Born 1958, Brendan is originally from Killaloe, County Clare, Ireland; a small town on the shores of Lough Derg on the river Shannon. Brendan moved to Scotland and married in 1980 and for many years carved a career as a Diamond-Point Glass Engraver from his workshop in Blairgowrie, Perthshire. These engravings included Portraits, Landscapes, Architecture, Heraldry and wildlife. The 1990’s saw the launch of Collins Crystal, a glass engraving company with Heraldry as its primary focus based in the picturesque town of Alyth Perthshire.
After the sale of Collins Crystal in 2004, Brendan focused his creative talent on visual art, initially with watercolour on paper then moving to Oil paints as his preferred medium. In 2013, Brendan received a BA Hons Fine Art degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and developed his loose impressionistic style infused with an indirect classical approach. Brendan draws inspiration from a number of 19th Century realist painters, in particular The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood and J W Waterhouse, but also from a number of contemporary artists across the globe.
Figurative compositions, portraiture and genre scenes are most appealing to Brendan, who likes to place the subject in an ambiguous narrative and invites the viewer to bring their own life experience to the story. One such example was Brendan’s degree show painting ‘The Garden of Enlightenment’. A large painting that featured several of his fellow students costumed in s scene inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron.
More recently Brendan completed a commission to paint an historic event which took place at Murthly Castle, Perthshire. ‘The Rendezvous’ depicted a gathering of European culture, Shoshone Indian and Mountain men from Wyoming. The event celebrated a Rendezvous which took place in 1837 and was documented by artist Alfred Jacob Miller.
Brendan would welcome commissions for Family Portraiture, Wedding Portraiture or any Figurative narrative, and can be contacted through the gallery.
