Colin Korovin
Wellington

• Text-based and Preacher Art

Colin is a passionate communicator, and he has a huge message to communicate.

Colin’s mission and his delight is to ‘text-map’ the world as it tumbles through time. He works in very simple materials in a very direct manner. He uses paper and ballpoint pen, sometimes interwoven with coloured pencil. Colin’s studio and his community is Vincent’s Community art workshop in Wellington where he works regular office hours.

Colin’s work might come under the title of ‘preacher art’, a category that applies to a manner of text-laden art from religious southern small-town America. Colin creates lists of global and local places and phenomena and he always locates himself and his station within the mix. Indicated on all work is the date, often including the season. The passage of time matters and is a real concern for Colin in his work.

Each work is a cosmology of interconnectedness and a poem or a prayer for good will, tolerance and peace across this infinite diversity.

The compositions are not planned; the process is intuitive, the relationships between areas of colour and open space are organic responses to the shape of the letters and the direction of the words. Colin’s division of the words themselves is similarly organic and free from conventions of grammar. What matters is that the words and their meanings fit into the available space. What I read from his drawings is the message “here we all are together, right now, it’s miraculous, let’s be nice to each other”.

But this is serious work. What is being communicated by this process of intense filling-in is a sense of urgency and an anxious concern that this message be impressed upon the world and the audience, as it is pressed into the paper.