Collopy lets her paintings do the talking
Go! feature
Chrissy Collopy makes it up as she goes along, improvising with paint and canvas the way a jazz saxophone player finds the pocket and grooves.
“Mostly, I start on the canvas and just keep going with my feeling and as things come to me,” said the Oxford artist. “I appreciate a lot of thing in nature and that’s where my inspiration comes from.
“You go into your zone and release yourself, cement yourself to a higher power and the energy that is all around you, so that it all becomes part of you. It’s really hard to explain because it’s something bigger than myself.
Sometimes, the images come so fast that she doesn’t even know herself what the painting is about until she steps back and starts analyzing it herself and with a black marker writes notes on the white edges of the canvas frames.
“Sometimes, the meaning of the painting doesn’t even come to me until I get the text out,” she said. “I can’t ever say myself when a painting is done because it will tell me.”
And when she starts telling visitors the story of a painting, it comes out almost trance-like, a stream-of-consciousness poem: “You see Everywoman and a man coming together as lovers. You see her sisters below and they’re jealous for the love that she has. Blood is thicker than water. Butterflies and swans eyeing her, seeing all of her life and death, opening a window through all time. This is the person in her love that lights the fire that warms the soul,” she said of one of her newer paintings titled “Soul Food.”
For her solo show Friday evening at the Creative Gallery in Cincinnati, Collopy chose the title “Reflections” after she realized that not only are her paintings reflections of her own life, but also that reflected images figure prominently in her latest work.
“It came to me,” she said, “but I can’t say I wasn’t mindful of it already because I had already started working on it in my paintings.”
In addition to nature, Collopy said she finds inspiration in the works of Salvador Dali, Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keefe and British painter Cecily Brown.
Born in northern Indiana, Collopy’s family moved around a lot because her father had “itchy feet,” as he likes to say.
When she was 14, he moved to New Mexico and she stayed in Oxford. It was also around that time that she started taking art seriously.
“That was the age when I realized that I can’t separate myself from art,” she said. “I painted for fun as a kid and never stopped. I wrote and drew in sketchbooks and I realized that I was getting pretty good at it, but I’m still learning.
When she was 20, she took some classes at Miami University when she was 20 from Lon Beck in Oxford and Ed Montgomery in Hamilton, but soon gave up the academic path and began studying more informally with artists she knows, especially Bill Berry, who runs the art supply store in Oxford.
“I wanted to work on my own stuff and they want you to learn through the professor,” she said. “I felt like I just needed to paint and draw.”
how to go
WHAT: Reflections: A solo show by Chrissy Collopy
WHERE: Creative Gallery, 1319 Main St., Cincinnati
WHEN: 6 to 11 p.m. Sept. 28
COST: No admission fee
MORE INFO: www.chrissyart.4t.com/
photos by Nick Daggy
