Ashley Collins, born in 1967, through 30 years of struggle, has become one of the most successful, living female contemporary painters in the world. Her blue-chip collector base has been built against every “accepted” artistic rule, and the pre-conceived narrow barriers of what defines “Contemporary Art.” Her works, layer by layer, stroke by stroke, year after year, persevering through pain and trial after trial, continue to break through the upper echelons, showing what can be achieved with two and three-dimensional art, and its impact on the world, and on each of us.

The depth of Ashley Collins’ art reflects her long and arduous journey. Without an understanding of that journey, the viewer can only begin to comprehend the depth of her work; the differences between a photograph of a vista compared to the impact and sensory feel of the vista itself.

Her journey is a catch-22; she prefers looking forward to looking back, and each new painting gives a multi-generational love and passion to its collector. Yet it is that journey that helps us understand her life’s canvas, and in turn, each of her amazing paintings.

When Collins moved to Los Angeles in 1988 to begin professionally painting, she arrived with no contacts, no money, nothing more than a dream against a world in which there were very few female artists at that time. Whatever the cause, this was the table at which she chose to sit. Repeatedly rejected by her family, the art community, and each gallery she approached for many, many years, Collins nevertheless continued: sleeping on concrete studio floors, in her car, and even in abandoned boats in the adjacent marina. Homeless, she could no more stop painting than you or I could stop breathing, living, thinking. During those years, Collins lived a developing-country existence in a developed country; all for her art. It did not matter if her stomach was empty, so long as she could buy paint. It did not matter if she had an apartment, so long as she could pay for a small studio wall.

After facing years of rejection, repeatedly told that her partial horse imagery could not be contemporary art, being courted by a galleries only to be rejected after finding out the artist was female, Collins gathered together and borrowed every dime she could and opened a small gallery off an alley in Venice, California, promoting “Ashley Collins” as a reclusive male artist. The guise worked, and in 1995, Collins sold her first work for the sum of $2500. To her, this sum was a fortune, and her career as a painter had truly begun. The journey since has been a continuous battle, every step of her success painfully earned. Perhaps most telling is that she, with no money, upon the sale of that first painting, donated 50% of that very first sale to charity.

Since that first sale, Collins has raised and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars for those least able to help themselves. From young kids with cancer in Idaho to neglected orphans in Cambodia. From education for girls in rural Morocco to life-saving operations for women in Ethiopia. From new, beautiful smiles of children in Latin America born with cleft palates to schools in the slums of Kenya. Collins not only paints with beauty, but with her brush, changes lives.