Michael Roque Collins: In the Chama, Where the Spirit Flows

Michael Roque Collins has turned to memory-based expressions of the Chama River Valley in Northern New Mexico in his new series of contemporary romantic expressionist works full of vibrant color and assertive brushwork. LewAllen Galleries presents an exhibition of Collins’ work, entitled In the Chama, Where the Spirit Flows, which opens Friday, November 24, 2023 and remains on view through January 1, 2024.

Most known for his allegorical oil paintings, Collins shifts his focus to thematic subjects within his landscape paintings, conveying the intersection of emotional energy with spiritual connection from his natural subjects. Within his enormous and extraordinary body of narrative painting, the subject and idea of landscape has also occupied a particularly important place for Collins, one in which past and present coexist in the rich forever of earth, forest, rock, river, and sky. He has long derived enormous psychic and artistic energy from the earth.