The Art of the Portrait: Beauty is in the details

Immensely gifted Janine Collins captivates the essence of her subject’s personality to create timeless portraits for her clients. The Lafayette artist got her start at an early age, pursuing her passion with various mediums. Upon observing her exquisite, nearly life-size portraits, one can feel the mood of the subject and sense their demeanor. While the human face is a focal point of her work, equally alluring is the beautifully rendered clothing, the folds of the fabric, and each small detail of the person’s attire.

“I started making clothes for my dolls when I was five years old,” she explains. By the time Collins was in high school, she was designing and sewing her own clothes. “Making the clothes and sewing them has really helped me with dressing the people and knowing what they should wear,” she says of her subjects. “I do a lot of tailoring of the clothes.”

Born in New Orleans and one of six children of the late Dr. Jason Collins and Malane White Collins, a professional pianist, the artist moved to Lafayette after graduating from Tulane University.

“My grandmother lived in New Roads. She was a musician, too. She had a lot of beautiful French furniture,” Collins says. “I would spend two weeks each summer drawing her furniture, starting when I was around eight years old.”

Later, when Collins attended Louise McGee she studied various art mediums. “They had a great art department, from ceramics to painting and jewelry making. My teacher’s father was a jewelry maker. He died and she gave me his jewelry equipment.”

Collins began making monogrammed jewelry and using semi-precious stones in her designs. At age 14 she had a jewelry business. “People were ordering from me. I found a jeweler at D.H. Holmes and I used to get on the streetcar after school, climb up the stairs, and I would go and sit in this little room and observe the jeweler working. I began to sell my jewelry to stores in the Quarter.” Collins began painting while in high school.

“The painting started to rev up more in college,” she says. Collins began doing life-size portraits while at Tulane, where she studied architecture for two years, then she switched to art history. After moving to Lafayette, she worked on her masters. “I had four children in seven and a half years. I was teaching children’s art classes privately in my home,” she says. “The portraits started when I drew a picture of one of my children. A woman whose child I taught came into my house and wanted a portrait.”

“I love to do hands. There is a lot of body language in the hands,” she says. “Everybody does something different; it is truly amazing. After I did a portrait, someone once said, ‘that’s the way my father used to do his hands’ and they had never realized it before.”

One of Collins’ recent commissions is a portrait of Edith Garland Dupré, founder of the Edith Garland Dupré Library at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Other projects in the artist’s repertoire include making glass lamps and creating architectural drawings of homes and interiors. “I also have a line of birds. The shapes are very abstract, and I make prints of them. They are selling very well,” she says.

Collins has passed on her artistic interests to her children. “All of my four children are artists, and two got their degrees in art. My son, who is an attorney, does wonderful abstract paintings. I have worked with them since they were little. They all have their own style and color codes. This is what we talk about when we get together. We don’t watch TV and we don’t cook. They come over and we talk about what they have painted.” Her children also all play instruments, an apt reflection of the family’s collective passions.

“It has all been word of mouth,” she says of her portrait commissions. “As far as my goals, I really want the client to be happy. I want the painting to be timeless; I also want it to be a fine painting, not just a portrait.” Collins vividly captures the innocence and youth of the children she paints, while portraying the inner spirit and intrinsic beauty of all her subjects. ✦