Jess Collins
Encyclopedia
Jess Collins simply known today as Jess, was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 visual artist.

Biography

Jess was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, California. He was drafted into the military and worked on the production of plutonium
Plutonium
Plutonium is a transuranic radioactive chemical element with the chemical symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, forming a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation...

 for the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...

. After his discharge in 1946, Jess worked at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington
Richland, Washington
Richland is a city in Benton County in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of Washington, at the confluence of the Yakima and the Columbia Rivers. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 48,058. April 1, 2011 estimates from the Washington State Office of Financial Management put the...

, and painted in his spare time, but his dismay at the threat of atomic weapons led him to abandon his scientific career and focus on his art.

In 1949, Jess enrolled in the California School of the Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...

) and, after breaking with his family, began referring to himself simply as "Jess". He met Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

 in 1951 and began a relationship with the poet that lasted until Duncan's death in 1988. In 1952, in San Francisco, Jess, with Duncan and painter Harry Jacobus, opened the King Ubu Gallery, which became an important venue for alternative art and which remained so when, in 1954, poet Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

 reopened the space as the Six Gallery.

Many of Jess's paintings and collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....

s have themes drawn from chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

, alchemy
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...

, the occult
Occult
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...

, and male beauty, including a series called Translations (1959–1976) which is done with heavily laid-on paint in a paint-by-number style. Collins also created elaborate collages using old book illustrations and comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

s (particularly, the strip Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy is a comic strip featuring Dick Tracy, a hard-hitting, fast-shooting and intelligent police detective. Created by Chester Gould, the strip made its debut on October 4, 1931, in the Detroit Mirror. It was distributed by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate...

, which he used to make his own strip Tricky Cad). Collin's final work, Narkissos, is a complex, beautifully rendered 6'x5' drawing owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

.

A Jess retrospective (Jess: A Grand Collage, 1951–1993) toured the United States in 1993–1994, accompanied by a book of the same title. The book included pictures of some of the paintings and collages from the tour. Interspersed between the pictures were essays by various contributors including poet Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists...

 who wrote an extended piece on Jess' Narkissos.

Sections of Jess' paintings 'Arkadia Last Resort' were used by Faithless
Faithless
Faithless were a British electronica band consisting of Maxi Jazz, Sister Bliss and Rollo. The group is best known for their dance songs . Faithless recorded six albums. During their career they sold over 15 million records worldwide...

 in 2004 for the front covers to their single "I Want More
I Want More (Faithless song)
"I Want More" is a song recorded by UK dance group Faithless, released as a single on 23 August 2004. It features a vocal sample from the singer and pianist Nina Simone...

."

Further reading

  • Jess: To and From the Printed Page. John Ashbery
    John Ashbery
    John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

    , Thomas Evans
    Thomas Evans (poet)
    Thomas Evans , was a Welsh poet.-Life and work:Evans, son of Evan and Hannah Evans, was born at Capel St. Lilin, Carmarthenshire. His early education was of the scantiest description, but he was ambitious and perserving. He was fortunate in meeting friends in unexpected quarters, and in getting...

    , Lisa Jarnot
    Lisa Jarnot
    Lisa Jarnot is an American poet and translator. She has published several volumes of poetry. She is an anti-war activist, works as a horticulturalist and lives in Sunnyside, Queens.-Bibliography :*The Fall of Orpheus, Shuffaloff Press, 1993....

    ; (Independent Curators International, 2007) ISBN 0916365751
  • Jess, a Grand Collage, 1951-1993. (Buffalo Fine Arts / Albright Knox Art Gallery, 1993) ISBN 0914782851

External links

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