Aspen Grove Fine Arts/Courtesy photo
When Ashley Collins moved to Los Angeles in 1988 to carve out a career as a fine artist, she ran up against strong gender stereotypes that female artists were unmarketable. But these days, galleries welcome her work with open arms, including Aspen Grove Fine Arts, which just signed her to the gallery and currently shows five of her works.
“Her reputation in Aspen has an incredible history, as she has been presenting her art here for over 25 years,” said Gallery Director Robert Wilborn, adding that museums and embassies worldwide collect her paintings. “Her life story is incredible in how she became one of the most prominent female artists living in the world today.”
She arrived in Los Angeles with no contacts or money and faced countless rejections from galleries. She slept on concrete studio floors, in her car, or in abandoned boats at a nearby marina. She survived assaulted robbery, rape, and beating. She often went hungry, opting to buy paint rather than food.
“Painter George Baselitz (said) ‘Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.’ That is the world I was up against,” she said. “But it made me stronger. I’m not big on protesting. I’m big on action. I am proud to be one of the early female artists to break the $100,000 glass ceiling, so that others could follow.”
When she couldn’t get into any galleries in the early days, she borrowed money to open a small gallery off an alley in Venice, promoting her name as a reclusive male artist. She sold her first horse-imagery painting for $2,500 and donated $1,250 to AIDS Project LA, just as AIDS emerged as a new threat. Since then, she has paid for more than 10,000 cleft palette surgeries and has helped thousands of women and children, from kids with cancer in the U.S. to orphans in Cambodia.
“No matter how difficult your life, your successes must be shared, or you simply cross the finish line alone with no one to share the joy. I am proud to have paid for more than 10,000 cleft palette surgeries — or the thousands of women and children whose lives have been changed, out of my pocket. It is not a boast; it is a powerful joy,” she said. “When I first set out to paint, I set out to heal the world — how’s that for a goal? (But) that was my goal, and it still is.”
While some say she paints horses, she said she doesn’t paint horses, but, rather, “the souls of those angels who come into our lives, sometimes for a moment, sometimes longer, and change our entire being. It could be a stranger at an airport who says just one sentence, but it changes our life. In my case, the angel that appeared happened to be four-legged, and did, indeed, alter my entire world.”
She believes horse imagery allows viewers to explore deeper stories without defensiveness. For example, a new work at Aspen Grove called “Realm” portrays the realm of possibility and what people choose as their realm.
“Is it about things? Is it about family? Is it about supporting our partner? Is it about helping complete strangers — this is not an easy question, and if I was depicting a human, the viewer would bring assumptions in — it is about ‘that’ human in the painting; it is not about me. But using portions of a figurative horse allows freedom to those exploring the question,” she said. “When your realm is without limits, you are also free from the chains that bind to you to past — this is different from the history that shaped you — for that difficult journey brought you to this point. But this point can either be an end or a beginning to something far more magical.
“Because my works have so many layers, there are endless ‘Easter eggs’ to find over the years within the work. That is how I show love.”
Throughout the decades, her work has changed drastically, but throughlines of love, strength, power, and persistence continue to emerge. Another theme involves imperfection. She embraces the “darkness” she has gone through, commenting that in today’s social media culture, many people highlight “a world of light without dark, (but) art is not possible without both, nor is life.”
“My images are all imperfect. In fact, I always begin by painting a perfect image and tearing it apart, sometimes with a chisel, sometimes with a knife, and then rebuilding, just as our own lives and bodies are reflections of our journey,” she said. “I have scars from countless operations — 12 broken ribs, a collapsed lung, titanium braces in my leg, a rebuilt collar bone, all from different life events — and, to me, they are a thing of beauty, a proof of overcoming. Moreover, they are simply part of my own journey. If I had not been homeless, I would not be who I am today.”
She incorporates pages from books dating back to the 1800s, building layers upon layers and breaking through boundaries of what often defines contemporary art.
“I have one of the largest collections of books from the 1800s, which find their way into every single painting. They come from all over the world. Think of the thousands of hands that have touched those pages. Each of those souls are now part of the paintings’ own history. They peer through, into our hearts,” she said.
She also integrates various materials that might be found on a construction site, such as screws.
“(People) understand that this is someone who’s pretty special and has a massive layering of depth and of color,” Wilborn said. “It’s physically engineered by multiple things. … When you look at the pieces, (you can think) ‘Wow, this is really kind of a bunch of little pieces … that are actually very well placed and informed. When you put it all together, you get a sense that it looks like it was chaos, but it’s a very sophisticated and balanced chaos coming together. Junk that’s supposed to be thrown away into a construction-site trash container actually turns out to be really nicely, and thoughtfully, placed. The physical construction of the pieces are just fantastic.”
People often ask Collins about her secret for success, and she replies that she simply got up more times than she got knocked down.
“Life is not easy, but it is beautiful. And the more time you take to learn the story of those around you, the more you will realize we all get thrown under the bus. That person living the perfect life on the outside is going through terrible struggles on the inside, that person who has it all — they lost it all twice before,” she said. “We all have to reclaim the warrior inside us, to spread our wings like the furious angels we truly are.”
