Current Artist

TRICIA SMITH HOLLINS
Artist Statement

"After a rewarding career in academia with full-time teaching positions at Miami of Ohio, UNO, College of St. Mary and Metropolitan Community College, I have retired and am now focusing, full-time, on my studio practice. Highlights from a long career include, teaching drawing, painting and 2D Design while raising a family and managing to maintain a continuous exhibition record.

"My paintings and drawings are inspired by the process of designing which always begins with a chosen shape and then proceeds in a way that feels similar to putting a puzzle together. Color is also a driving force, always intuitive rather than representational. At first glance, my artwork may appear purely abstract but on close examination, subtle shapes may reveal resemblances to their environmental sources and indicate the presence of personal narrative. Source material may be timeless symbols, like architectural forms and doorways, as well as those that derive from nature. Some compositions may spring from a recent journey, sketchbook doodles or dreams. Regardless of their genesis, images and forms that come as surprises to me are definitely preferred. In the absence of a good dream, I often turn to automatic drawing, a tool used by Surrealists, to spark imagination.

"The current exhibit at the County-City Building in Lincoln, features a variety of water-based drawing and painting media. Dreaming in Color contains pieces from four recent bodies of work: Connections, Cloud Cities, Shapes and Lines and Number Games. The paintings from the Connections series all began with identical compositional structures. Morphed and mirrored each time, this recognizable scaffolding allowed for many variations. Cloud Cities is a series of paintings that uses layering and transparencies of positive and negative shapes to evoke the feeling of crowed urban spaces. Paintings from the Shapes and Lines series grew from a recent trip to Nova Scotia. With thoughts of maps and travel fresh in my mind, I recycled and rearranged an amusing collection of shapes to create the different compositions. Number Games is my most recent series. These drawings were inspired by a game I have enjoyed playing with my grandson. It involves randomly drawing two sets of numbers, one to twenty, on a piece of paper and then trying to connect matching numbers with lines that cannot cross. When making the drawings, I made three additional rules to the original game: only use earth colors, anything can be erased or added to at will, and any rule can be broken. Needless to say, the drawings took on lives of their own."