As a youth I went with my grandparents to a festival in New Roads, Louisiana, the big town of Pointe Coupée Parish, where ancestors of various shades have hailed from time immemorial. While the assembled danced to swamp pop, I perused the paintings of an art contest. I recall a spiritless, photorealistic canvas of a small house. Louis Darensbourg, my grandfather, who lived his entire life on our family farm in nearby Rougon, noted, “That one has to win. It looks like a picture.” It did win, and I didn’t have the background at the time to articulate why that bothered me.
Like Aaron Collier, I encountered Jackson Pollock and the larger art world as a teen, birthing an engagement with non-representational works and the ideas underneath. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Aaron a bit for this project, especially given some commonalities of our backgrounds, learning the ways we’ve both incorporated and departed from our origins in our artistic practices.
Aaron notes that his works at Other Plans are invitations to a conversation with the viewer. It is my hope that our discussion here contributes to that.
-Jeffery U. Darensbourg
AARON COLLIER x JEFFERY U. DARENSBOURG
Jeffery U. Darensbourg (JD): Aaron, one of the things that really strikes me about you is that you're from a rural background. I’ve experienced people pigeonholing rural people into traditional types of art such as folk music, basketry, traditional forms of pottery, rather than creating non-representational art, as if abstract art is a more modern discipline associated with fashionable cities. I wonder if you could speak to that. How did you begin creating non-representational art, and have you ever felt the pressure to create something different because of your background?
Aaron Collier (AC): I grew up in rural western North Carolina, just below Boone, the former headquarters of Holly Farms/Tyson, Lowe’s Hardware, NASCAR, and moonshine. I was extremely fortunate that my high school offered an art class, and I think I took it more times than I may have been allowed. I drew from a young age, with the goal of impressing family or teachers with how mimetic or life-like the drawing could be. I worked hard in the backseat of a Dodge Caravan on long trips or on the floor of my bedroom. I just really enjoyed the act of bringing something into being that looked like what I was observing. But then I had a really weird cousin. I don't even know if he was technically my cousin… Let’s say he was related by marriage. He was living in West Virginia and found out during a Christmas gathering that I liked Norman Rockwell: he told me to go to the library and look into Jackson Pollock.
JD: Very related.
AC: Yeah, exactly. To this day, I do not know what motivated him to plant that seed, but because he was one of the few people in my life that made a recommendation like that, I took it seriously. I went to the library, and I found these books and I'm like, "What? What is this?"
JD: What struck you about it?
AC: What I discovered was that rather than a painting or drawing or image having to have a mimetic relationship to the world, the painting or surface could become a world unto itself. That was very new to me. I began creating art with the desire to represent faithfully, and I came by it honestly. Abstract painters that I started looking into had such a range of voice and possibility in the medium that I was previously closed off to. What I realize now is that the paint can have its own intentions. So I started to respond to what the medium opened up, as opposed to what I was attempting to do with the medium. At that juncture, I think there was an uncertainty about my intentions as the artist, and that became a point of consternation among those who knew what I was up to previously.
JD: Do you think that your earlier training, self-training or otherwise, in mimesis has aided your later abstraction?
AC: Absolutely. I think one of the gifts of learning to draw and paint from life is developing a slowness and attentiveness. I think it's absolutely present in a lot of the shapes that I'm making in these paintings. I'm borrowing from a vocabulary of drawing the figure, or from what the organic world offers in its very beautiful and subtle wobble.
JD: Is that part of your conversation with the viewer?
AC: I want to make that conversation available, recognizing that with any visual language there are some viewers who will delve into conversation willingly, and some who’ll stay a mile away. I want there to be enough information to register as familiar, but for there to also be something slippery or elusive.
JD: Is that part of how you perceive the world?
AC: Yes, absolutely. There are days in which the most familiar things occur, but then something completely opaque or ambiguous or uncertain shares an edge with what is familiar or routine.
JD: I find your paintings hard to see quickly in their fullness. They hold you by the hand on a little journey through landscapes that are almost familiar but unable to be defined.
AC: A pictorial device I'll point out is a sort of framing or enclosure. I’m thinking in particular of Lily Among the Brambles. It’s almost stalagmite-like: cavernous; dark; neutral in color. This cavernous framing provides an additional weird enclosure inside the gallery space.
JD: Given your background and living in a large city, do you still find yourself going to rural areas for inspiration?
AC: Absolutely. I fish as often as I can and enjoy the remote locales it requires. And I’m fishing from the bank, often on a jetty of rocks or grassy enclosure.
JD: Where do you fish around here?
AC: Shell Beach, Hopedale, that area. But if I really have a lot of time, I'll head down toward Venice and Port Sulphur. I enjoy the isolation of that sort of space, and I think the sort of enclosure I’ve developed in these paintings is a little bit of an isolating element. There’s no world in these paintings that expands and keeps going, even though there's implied information that runs off either side. There's either a kind of safety or security in that, or there's a feeling maybe of being trapped. One of the two, maybe?
JD: What art influences you that isn’t painting?
AC: I really enjoy short stories. I enjoy Flannery O'Connor, maybe predictably, being from the South. But yeah, the short story, because of its blatant and inherent limitations. The author presumably has a very finite amount of space in order to create a world, to create a narrative dynamic that is active, and it has to happen with so few elements.
JD: Do you think that's true of the sort of standard rectangular format of paintings?
AC: I do. I have toyed with a sort of non-rectilinear shape. I have thought about how the work might expand into the space differently, but I do really love the embraced obstacle of the rectilinear format. I know that this 48-by-60-inch zone is what I have to work with, and if something's gonna come to life, it's gotta happen within this very finite and artificial space. Also, for an artist who really enjoys brokenness and fragmentation, I still think the givenness of repetition in the rectilinear format is exciting to me. That probably sounds boring to my children, but...
JD: Why would you think it to be boring? People spend a lot of their time staring at little rectangles these days.
AC: You're exactly right. And the square of Instagram is thoroughly embraced.
JD: But not just that. I mean, when I was growing up, people were spending all their time staring at TV.
AC: One gift of the rectilinear format is the edge. In my drawing practice, which is visually quite different than the painting, the edge is something very activated and strategic. I think coming to terms with what is beyond the frame is a really fun dynamic to toy with.
JD: I was quite influenced growing up in Baton Rouge by the painter, sculptor, and jazz musician Emerson Bell, a Black beatnik from the old days who had served in the Korean War. He was still learning new techniques until he died in 2006, long after he’d achieved success. That’s had a long influence on me. I’m wondering how this show might represent some aspect of your own development, something you're trying to do now that’s different for you.
AC: Yeah, that's a great question. I think this particular body of paintings at Other Plans brings together some previous paintings (notably around 2022) when I was dealing with shapes that looked more like letters. And then there are drawings and paintings where I'm exclusively dealing with the fragmentation of architectural ruins. So, I think I was dealing with the multivalency of language or letters, and then later the double-time or stacked chronologies that architectural ruins present. In this body of work as a whole, those pictorial strategies are merging.
JD: What texts are influencing your work right now?
AC: There is a book that I'm reading currently called The Seven Modes of Uncertainty by Namwali Serpell. She's a big Toni Morrison scholar, and in this book, she’s analyzing six or seven different novels. She discusses the way the novel form carries the reader into this place of uncertainty, and the way that uncertainty is different than ambiguity or even indeterminacy. I really like what she says about uncertainty and the way that it's interactive and temporal. There's an experiential quality. It's relational. If you're uncertain about a thing, there's this real kind of active and dynamic negotiation, and even though she's talking about the literary form, I do think that there are aspirations I have as a painter to situate the viewer in a place of uncertainty.
I think uncertainty implies that there's enough to go on, or a place to start. There's a seed, a nugget, a kernel of foundation to stand on, but there's a real negotiation with the things that are unknown in that state as well. I was raised as a Christian, and the parts of the biblical text I most enjoy returning to are prophetic writings or the poetry in the Hebrew scriptures where there is an invocation of a multi-temporal imagination, where what's being said is true in multiple ways. I think of the Song of Solomon. This poetry being included in the biblical canon is really fascinating because of how both literal and metaphorical its interpretations are. It’s literally juicy.
JD: I can’t help but think back to your path of becoming an artist, as a young person in a rural setting, drawing your surroundings, then opening up to this world of ambiguity of abstract painting.
AC: My thinking about art has definitely been shaped in response to the environment that I was in early on. I attended a small liberal arts college in South Carolina, Presbyterian College. I went there to major in Christian Education, thinking I would work in the church my whole life. It was in the art department where the complexity of painting opened to me. A professor of mine, Mark Anderson, asked serious questions about the work that I was making and how I was living my life. I realized there could be a devotional element to this practice that wasn't a violation of the second commandment’s prohibition of idolatry. I realized there could be an embrace of something that in my upbringing was at best considered a hobby.
JD: Since becoming a trained artist, have you returned to explicitly religious themes?
AC: I can confidently say that I've undertaken the religious themes of lamentation or sorrow or exuberance or praise in a work. There are some shapes in the paintings that certainly lean cruciform, as if there could be a figure, but I would hesitate to say that I have pictured religious themes through human subjects.
A theologian named Cecilia González-Andrieu writes about the way that fundamentalists have kind of waved away art and its ambiguity, thinking that it's too dangerous to have something say too many things at the same time.
JD: Definitely - it leads one into complexity of thought, and that's not what totalitarian movements are about. In my own work I really strive to complicate people's perceptions of very standard categories about types of people and ethnicity, and also this very complicated place where I live that people continue to try to simplify. Can you share a quote from González-Andrieu that really speaks to this?
AC: Absolutely. She says “...that the arts reveal by involving us deeply as more than mere observers, that they confound and complicate things so that our mind has to relinquish its illusions of power and control. That they are embodied and attest to our embodiment. And finally, that they are polysemic, always suggesting more than can be clearly stated. Because of all of this, the arts have the potential to confront and undo dogmatism, fundamentalism, and totalitarianism."
I think that the elasticity of belief and the elasticity that paintings invite someone toward are both really beneficial.
Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans. He teaches drawing and painting at Tulane University as an Associate Professor. Collier has had solo exhibitions at Acadiana Center for the Arts, Octavia Art Gallery, Cole Pratt Gallery, and Staple Goods, an artist cooperative in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and has been featured in New American Paintings. Collier’s paintings are represented in collections such as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. He has enjoyed artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, ISCP in Brooklyn, and OAZO in Amsterdam.
Jeffery U. Darensbourg is a writer, performer, and researcher living in the “Place of Speakers of Other Languages,” Bulbancha. His works center on topics from his life: mixed Indigenous ethnicity in Louisiana, Indigenous foundations of regional culture, and mental illness. He was a 2024 United States Artists fellow and holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science.
A printed version of this interview was published on the occasion of Collier's exhibition at Other Plans in 2026. Contact info@otherplans.gallery to request a copy.