thu 28/03/2024

The return of Edwyn Collins - the artist | reviews, news & interviews

The return of Edwyn Collins - the artist

The return of Edwyn Collins - the artist

When musician Edwyn Collins, who had a massive hit both sides of the Atlantic with "A Girl Like You", and was also the front-man of Eighties band Orange Juice, suffered a double brain haemorrhage in 2005, he was initially unable to speak, read or write. So the extent of his recovery – he is now performing and writing music again - without wishing to resort to triumph-over-tragedy mawkishness, seems nothing short of miraculous. Of course, there were no miracles, just six long years of arduous, on-going rehabilitation – not to mention unswerving support from his wife and manager, Grace Maxwell, and their son William - much of which Collins, who studied commercial art, has spent drawing. And now a substantial number of these drawings can now be seen in a new exhibition, Edwyn Collins: Nature Punk.

Collins was encouraged to draw from a very early age by his parents who were both artists – his father, Peter, is one of the youngest people to have been made a Royal Scottish Academician and his work can be seen in The National Gallery of Scotland. After he left art college, Collins, who was then 19, worked as an illustrator for the Glasgow Parks Department designing information leaflets about the parks’ flora and fauna – he is passionate about wildlife and says he cannot remember a time when he didn’t love birds. Sometimes he would take schools out on nature trails and the exhibition's is a reference to one such occasion when a child, having clocked Collins’s slightly alternative garb asked, “Sir, are you a punk?” To which Collins replied, “Yes, children. I’m Nature Punk.”

Shortly afterwards, he left the Parks Department to pursue music full-time but Collins carried on drawing, often creating artwork for Postcard Records, the record label he set up with in 1979 with Alan Horne.

Fast forward twenty or so years and his strokes have left Collins with very little mobility on his right-hand side, which means he can no longer play the guitar on stage and has had to learn to draw using his left hand. It was Maxwell who first put a pencil into his hand on one of the early, difficult days at the beginning of his recovery and at first he could only produce a scribble. But he persevered – a colossal understatement if ever there was one – and after about seven months he began to draw a cartoon character, which he and Maxwell nicknamed “The Guy”, over and over again. “Actually,” says Maxwell, half-joking, “I started to get a bit worried about him, obsessively drawing the same thing so I said, ‘Why don’t you try a bird?’”

HobbyHis first attempt, a widgeon duck, was a little crude but Collins felt encouraged enough to continue. “After a few drawings I began to feel more confident,” he tells me over. “I began to see it [the drawing] was getting better. And it took me a while but I’m now using colour.”

Nature Punk is not Collins’ first exhibition following his strokes, but it is his largest and most confident – almost all the works, which are mainly of birds (Hobby, (2010) pictured above) – although some fish, a deer and a couple of rabbits have also sneaked in – have been dated, which means that the exhibition follows his recovery process, which is astonishing – a couple of his bird drawings have even been snapped up by a wallpaper design company. Collins has also created several large scale versions of his studies especially for this show.

However, despite his love of nature, he is not restricting himself to drawing wildlife. He has recently been collaborating with The Drums, a New York-based band who asked him to come up with 12 illustrations for its book of 12 flexi-discs – a drawing for each track. Collins has drawn each one from his imagination, using the song lyrics as inspiration.

It is of course, impossible to ignore some of the affects of the strokes – Collins now walks with a cane and his speech can be slurred and hesitant, particularly when he is tired. However, his singing voice delivers and it would seem that his music career is once more in the ascendant. He recently – triumphantly – appeared at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and has just returned from the European leg of his tour which he takes to the United States and Japan in March.

But wherever he goes, he’ll be taking a sketchbook. “When I’m drawing, I’m relaxed. I feel good about myself. It’s just me – there’s nobody telling me what to do.”

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