Nick Collerson

As a boy, Collerson would listen eagerly as his grandfather recited Robert Burns’ poem To a Mouse in a feigned Scottish accent. “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie, / O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” Hatched here was his lifelong love of poetry and the poetic. As I chat to the artist in his Marrickville studio, our conversation plunges in and out of painting and poetry as if they were one. Perhaps, indeed, they are.

Collerson’s studio—a former SES [State Emergency Service] hall—is long and mostly windowless, spacious yet stacked with canvases. As we sit, I ask about his day and Collerson mentions he’s been translating Aristotle’s Poetics, using self-taught Ancient Greek. Ancient philosophy is a cavernous place to begin, so I segue to a drum kit and guitar in the corner of the room. “I’m teaching myself for intellectual stimulation,” he explains, “Learning an instrument teaches you about how you learn.” I realise, rapidly, that this is an artist for whom the mind is seated above all else.

Collerson speaks with a curious accent, the curvature of some words sharp against an Australian flatness. He was born in Newfoundland, Canada, but moved countries several times in childhood trailing the professional path of his father, a geologist. In 1980 his family relocated to Canberra, then back to Canada, and down to California, settling in Brisbane in 1991. The artist reflects, “My sense of being between cultures made me question ideas of nationality, identity, and culturally ingrained presumptions. This eventually led me to take up meditation practice, which I continue to this day.”

Salient across Collerson’s oeuvre is the sidewalk motif, forming horizontal strata of gutter, footpath, barrier (wall, fence, gate). A former professional skater, Collerson has a long relationship with the street, and he describes his paintings as a street scene that goes on forever. “Skateboarding is fundamentally a creative reinterpretation of spaces. I always thought of standing on a moving skateboarding as traveling without moving.”

Mid-chat, he plucks a printout off the wall. It’s Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, 1657-1658. Collerson admires the poetry of this work; “She’s been pouring that milk for over four hundred years!” A meditative idea, stasis in movement—much like skateboarding. Inspired by this painting, Collerson’s earliest street work, Drain, 2015, depicts water trickling down a street drain. A subtle allegory for life, perhaps, the drainage of being. Compositionally, the footpath and gutter are sloped downwards, and it feels as though we are ourselves sliding towards the drain.

In recent years, Collerson has pushed his street scenes into psychedelic spheres. Spending so much time in an overlooked space like the curb foments vast symbolist possibility. As the artist explains how objects in his paintings play with allusion rather than information, our conversation turns to the symbolist tradition. “Symbolism is the primary way that an artist engages with the intellect,” he comments. “It’s the poetic method of philosophy.” Collerson works in a unique historical lineage straddling French symbolism, surrealism (specifically pataphysics), European and Middle Eastern poetics. As he summarises pataphysics as the continuation of an unbroken chain of poetics stretching from pre-Platonic philosophy, he pauses: “This sounds terribly nerdy but it can’t be helped; I’m a terrible nerd!”

I turn to the canvases hanging in his studio. Colanders, cats, the moon, the sidewalk—his inventory of symbols is rich, consistent, honed over years. A large unfinished painting radiates from the wall, more than the others, its uncharacteristic yellow hue glowing like the midnight aura of a McDonald’s sign. In this work, five cats recline around a winged sphinx, which hovers in the centre like an apparition. Courting the base of the canvas is a colander, a symbol for straining or separating something out. I can’t help but read this work in the symbolic mode of the vanitas. An uprooted pine tree rests on the pavement, the ubiquitous trope of festive detritus. Empty glasses and bottles embody time running out like an urban hourglass. A lone cluster of grapes on a potted vine point to pleasure and poison, Dionysus and death. Even the thinly applied paint summons temporality and transience.

Our conversation itself seems to take on a symbolist valency as Collerson slides from California and colanders to Duchamp and dithyrmabos. “I agree with Duchamp”, he says, “Being an artist is a mediumistic activity, whereby an artist is moved to make by objective realities over which the artist has no control. My art is a practice of simply being part of what is innate.” He has an intuitive way of working in the surrealist vein of automatic painting, beginning not with a composition in mind but “concerns.” Collerson finds his paintings in the process; “The paintings I make are ahead of me.”

“I like to start paintings with the wrong move,” he admits, “because you have to be creative with how you move forward.” He gestures towards a small work portraying a spiderweb and the moon, joking about the clumsiness, its naivety. He tells me that the moon is a perennial pan-cultural symbol for the mind.

We circle back to Aristotle and as he clarifies what dithyrambic poetry is, Collerson’s art starts to make sense. Or . . . it makes sense that it doesn’t make sense. In this ancient poetic genre, the text is treated as a body smashed apart with information scattered throughout, and the reader must piece it together. Collerson’s paintings are, certainly, dithyrambic. Atop a moonlit lawn in Dithyrmabos, 2021-23, a strange constellation of props simultaneously engenders and entangles meaning—mugs, bottles and glasses, a speaker, a guitar, a plastic chair, a colander. This could be the dank residue of a backyard rave, the carefully curated mise en scène of a stage performance, or an enigmatic page from Poe. There is a feeling of mystery and madness, swaddled in serenity. A featureless man stands beside a supine figure on the ubiquitous sidewalk. Though Collerson prefers viewers to interpret freely, he divulges that the sleeping figure represents a method of meditation used in ancient philosophical practice, called mantis. In latromantis, 2023, this figure glows emerald on the pavement, flanked by nine cats whose eyes flicker with spectral omniscience. The link between felines and ancient deities comes to mind, but Collerson notes that his cats are a kind of consciousness in the works, alluding to the meditation of Parmenides.
Collerson’s art is a lyrical universe, a vast allegorical city populated by pieces from the mosaic of a multiplex mind. When I ask how he came to art, Collerson can’t exactly answer. For him art is not an act, but a lens. A form of vision. His paintings are crafted from the “lineaments of seeing;” the qualities of what it is like to perceive rather than an inventory of appearances. He comments, “I consider the poetics, or play of meaning in painting, above illusion or demonstration of skill.” Opticality and visuality are eclipsed by aura, feeling. In paintings such as Pluto, 2022–23, Collerson harnesses ubiquity as a bridge between allegory and reality. The plastic patio chair (a suburban staple), water bottles clad in universal blue labels, a dozy cat, the mid-century balustrade—we see these every day. And yet, this scene is miles from mundane. The background beckons us with a celestial horizon that looks more like a vista from Mars. On the sidewalk is a painting of Saturn, while a tiny crescent moon and sun sleep in the gutter—beside a colander, of course.

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 68, 2024. 
Images courtesy of the artist, and PALAS, Sydney