Jess Collins

Jess Collins
Birth name	Burgess Franklin Collins
Born	August 6, 1923(1923-08-06) Long Beach, California
Died	January 2, 2004(2004-01-02) (aged 80)
Nationality	American
Field	Visual art
Training	San Francisco Art Institute

Jess Collins (August 6, 1923 - January 2, 2004), simply known today as Jess, was an American 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 for the Manhattan Project. After his discharge in 1946, Jess worked at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington, 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) and, after breaking with his family, began referring to himself simply as "Jess". He met Robert Duncan 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 reopened the space as the Six Gallery.

Many of Jess's paintings and collages have themes drawn from chemistry, alchemy, the occult, 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 strips (particularly, the strip Dick Tracy, 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.

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 who wrote an extended piece on Jess' Narkissos.

Sections of Jess' paintings 'Arkadia Last Resort' were used by Faithless in 2004 for the front covers to their single "I Want More."

Further reading

• Jess: To and From the Printed Page. John Ashbery, Thomas Evans, Lisa Jarnot; (Independent Curators International, 2007) ISBN 0916365751
• Jess, a Grand Collage, 1951-1993. (Buffalo Fine Arts / Albright Knox Art Gallery, 1993) ISBN 0914782851

External links

• San Francisco Art Institute: Jess Collins, BFA 1951 from San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 2004 [1] by Kenneth Baker
• Ask/ART: Jess
• Jess: To and From the Printed Page exhibition of Jess's impastos from his "Translation" series together with many of his collages and designs, as well as the books and magazines in which they were reproduced
• Guide to the Jess Papers at The Bancroft Library
• Pulled Through Time: A "CalTech News" Reporter Traces the Life of an Elusive Artist
• Works by or about Jess Collins in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Persondata
Name	Collins, Jess
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	August 6, 1923
Place of birth	Long Beach, California
Date of death	January 2, 2004
Place of death