Steve Collins grew up in Kansas, got his design degree from KU, and eventually landed in Edgecomb, Maine. His booth tells you everything you need to know about how his practice works: large abstract canvases on one wall, a red sailboat on another, and in the foreground, a pair of painted accent tables with geometric patterns he designed and finished himself. It is all the same person.
The range is real. Interior design, graphic design, and fine art are different disciplines with different demands, and Steve works in all three — not as a hedge, but because the problems in each field are genuinely different. The design background shows in how he thinks about proportion and space, including in his paintings. His booth is not an accident. The pedestals, the sightlines, the way the large abstract piece anchors the room — that is a designer thinking about how work lives in a room.
The abstraction is where he keeps returning. The large canvas — a black void ringed in deep red, almost geological in texture — is a good example of what he is after: something that stays open. Figurative painting makes a contract with the viewer. Abstraction invites a different kind of looking, and what you bring to it changes what you see. Steve works in representational modes too, the landscapes and the sailboats, but the abstract work is where the conversation gets more interesting.
He has been showing for a while. Kansas, Missouri, Connecticut, New York, and now Maine — a career that moved east over time, finding rooms in different cities. The work has changed as the context changed, but the sensibility has stayed consistent: someone who thinks in images across a wide range, and has been doing it long enough to know what he cares about.
Steve also holds a particular place in the Maine Pottery Co. story. He managed our Edgecomb gallery for a stretch, and his fingerprints are still all over the place in ways most visitors would never know. He still helps — quietly, without being asked. That kind of generosity is not nothing. We have been selling his work across all three of our locations for a few years now, and we are proud of that. Proud of the work, proud of the friendship, and genuinely glad he ended up on this coast.
The furniture pieces are worth stopping at. The geometric accent tables in grays and creams, the blue side table with its red drawer — these are not decorative afterthoughts. They are what happens when a graphic designer and fine artist decides to think about furniture. The motifs track with the paintings. He is not switching modes so much as applying the same eye to a different surface.