Art

The Rein Maker

May 8, 2026

Words by Betsy Marr, Photos by MADISON SCARLATA

Ashley Collins occupies rare territory in contemporary art.

A blue-chip artist with a fiercely devoted collector base, she was the first woman in America to break the $100K mark, a milestone that says as much about her audacity as it does about the art world that once failed to take her seriously.

Her paintings are monumental, tactile, soulful, and instantly recognizable, carrying the force of myth alongside the scars of a woman who refused to break.

One of the most successful living female contemporary artists in the world, Collins is a painter whose market and reputation were built against the usual rules of what art was supposed to be.

On a sunny afternoon in Napa, she moves between her vineyard, studio, and her elegant sprawl of home with little of that mythology on display. Petite and blonde, Collins is a tour de force whose size belies her giant persona. Warm, soulful, and entirely unassuming, she does not perform importance. She simply possesses it. There is no grand theater to her, no self-conscious mystique. Instead, there is the far more compelling confidence of someone who has already survived enough to stop announcing herself.

That quality – that quiet self-assurance – is all over her work.

Collins is, of course, often associated with horses, but to call her simply an equestrian artist is to miss the scale of both the woman and the work. She is not painting animals in any literal sense, and she is quick to make that distinction. “People get very confused when I say I don’t paint horses,” she says. “I paint the soul of someone who helped me survive as a child. It just happened to be in the form of a horse.” In her work, the horse becomes something even larger: a “spiritual mirror,” as she puts it. A carrier of freedom, wisdom, burden, and hope. The image, in other words, is not genre. It is language.

That distinction comes into especially sharp focus with Horsepower, her upcoming exhibition with Relevant Galleries in Denver, framed as “An Understanding of Power.” The show pairs Collins’ paintings with photography by David Yarrow and positions the horse alongside the sculptural beauty of the automobile, exploring what the gallery calls “the timeless language of power.” It is an elegant premise, but Collins’ own interest in power runs deeper than style. “Horsepower is indeed imbedded within our very core,” she says. “Power itself is seductive.” Then, in classic Ashley fashion, she redirects the idea toward something moral rather than glamorous. “True power,” she says, “lies in what one does with it.”

Power is a word that keeps resurfacing around Collins, though she defines it differently than most people do. She has no interest in power as showmanship. “I am a very shy person by nature,” she says. “My expression is by paintbrush and canvas rather than voice. The greatest power,” she adds, “can be as simple as a single word. No. So quiet, yet so powerful.”

And yet she knows another form of power too, the louder one demanded by hardship. “For all of us, there are times when we are forced to raise our wings and fight like furious angels with every ounce of strength we have.”

That is not metaphor in her case. It is biography.

Her life story has been told before, but in person it lands with far more force than any boilerplate art-world legend. Collins arrived in Los Angeles in 1988 with no contacts, no money, and little besides conviction, then spent years homeless, sleeping on concrete studio floors, in her car, and in abandoned boats while trying to create, all the while forcing open a door into a world that kept rejecting her. She has also spoken about the art establishment’s resistance both to horse imagery and to the idea of a woman artist operating at that scale and ambition. At one point, she promoted “Ashley Collins” as a reclusive male artist just to get the work seen.

That history is not merely backstory. It lives in her work itself. Collins’ paintings do not feel manufactured from comfort so much as weathered into being. Each canvas begins with antique pages from Harper’s Monthly Review, giving stories from the past a new life within the piece itself. Those pages are filled with essays, poetry, and illustrations documenting the evolution of humanity and culture. She uses them as a way of allowing older voices to whisper beneath the surface of the present. “Each page carries a century of human hope,” she says. “I give it a new heartbeat.”

That combination of history, touch, and emotional force is central to Collins’ visual language. She is drawn to things that have already been handled, already weathered, already shaped by time. “All my paintings include actual pages from the 1800s within the work,” she says. “Those pages have been touched by thousands of hands by the time they found their way into my studio.”

But the Harper’s pages are only the beginning. Collins’ works are mixed-media pieces where oil paint is only one part of the vocabulary. She shoots arrows into a canvas and leaves them there. She battles a piece with a sword and lets the blade or its damage become part of the final work. She incorporates objects like locks, chains, and bolts, sometimes as symbols of rupture and repair, sometimes as literal invitations for the viewer to engage with the piece by breaking something open and putting it back together. She climbs towering ladders to work across monumental surfaces, attacking and building, layering and revising, until the painting carries not just an image but the record of a struggle. Even the back of each work is part of the story, often written on, marked, or inscribed as though the painting were a private journal before it ever became a public object. The effect is not merely nostalgic, but physical and cumulative. Her paintings do not just suggest memory. They bear its evidence.

It is the same with beauty. Collins loves beauty, but she has no use for something decorative that does not go deeper. “That’s such a great word, decorative,” she says, laughing. “I like to call it couch art.” The phrase is funny, but the contempt is real. Her own work is meant to reveal itself over decades. “I paint for generations,” she says. “Part of the many layers are so that people still find surprises after having a painting for 30 years.” This is not couch art. It is work built to remain alive.

Scale is part of that ambition too. Collins speaks with real delight about working large, and about the mismatch between her physical size and the size of her canvases. “I love scale,” she says. “I think because of my small size, 5’3”, I wanted everything larger than life. I still do.” She has described assembling massive multi-panel works in tiny spaces, pulling them outside to fit them together, then dragging them back in to keep going. Monumentality, for Collins, is not flourish. It is an emotional necessity. “The beauty of life sometimes demands something greater than what we can normally see.”

The art world eventually caught up with this ethos. Collins’ work now lives in private and institutional collections that read less like a patron list than a map of cultural and financial power: Peter and Melanie Munk, Kristy Walton, Alice Walton, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, Robert Redford, Stan Kroenke, Jerry Jones, Tony Robbins, Brian and Veronica Grazer, the Horchow family, Post Malone, and Lady Gaga, among others. Museum and corporate collections include the Laguna Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, U.S. Embassy Collections, Barrick Gold, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. Entertainment. It is the kind of roster that signals not flash, but reach.

That breadth matters because it helps explain something essential about Collins. Her appeal is not niche, regional, or trend-bound. It stretches across worlds: art, film, business, philanthropy, old money, new money, and the kind of private collectors who have long since stopped buying what they are supposed to buy and started buying what they love. Collins herself puts it simply. “The common denominator among my collectors is not status, but that they have moved beyond convention. They respond to work that does not merely decorate, but lives with them,” she explains.

The Hollywood thread is real too, though Collins speaks about it less as celebrity adjacency and more as artistic kinship. She says the relationship between her paintings and the film world began years ago through collectors from that sphere, including Robert Redford, whom she calls one of her early collectors and friends.

More recently, her work entered Taylor Sheridan’s orbit through Landman, which she frames as a natural meeting of sensibilities. “Taylor Sheridan does not just create programs. He creates worlds, telling stories on a grand scale while slipping in more complex questions without seeming beholden to anyone.” Collins says it was “a special treat” to have collectors calling to ask whether the paintings onscreen were hers, and she specifically thanks Taylor and Nicole Sheridan for bringing the work into that universe. The same page notes Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, Ali Larter, and Andy Garcia in connection with the paintings’ screen presence.

What is notable, though, is not merely that Collins’ work can hold its own in a cinematic world. It is that Sheridan’s universe and hers are speaking a similar language. Both are interested in power, moral force, land, loyalty, mythology, violence, and survival. Both understand that scale can be emotional, not just visual. And both know that beneath all the grandeur, the real story is usually about endurance. Collins herself has spoken admiringly not just of Sheridan, but of the women in his worlds, including the grit and grace she sees in the real-life women whose strength helped inspire Landman.

Yet what makes Collins interesting is that she never mistakes visibility for substance. She is far more compelled by meaning than by fame. “I wanted to change the world through love,” she says. “And that makes people uncomfortable.” It is a startling sentence, especially now, when irony is often mistaken for sophistication. Collins has little patience for what she sees as the art world’s appetite for the “wow of the moment,” its tendency to chase sex, politics, spectacle, or easy provocation. She wants something slower and harder to dismiss. Work that consoles without pandering. Work that strengthens rather than shocks. Work that remains.

That helps explain the unusual emotional weather of her paintings. They are beautiful, yes, but never merely ornamental. Mythic, but never hollow. Large, but somehow intimate. She once described her process as listening rather than asserting, entering what her husband calls a “fugue state” where time falls away and she no longer knows whether she has been painting for two hours or eight. “I am listening to each soul tell me it needs,” she says. It is a mystical line, but also a revealing one. Collins does not paint like a cynic. She paints like someone convinced the unseen is real.

That conviction becomes even more powerful when the conversation turns to hardship. Collins has spoken candidly about being raped, about the trial that followed, about police escorts because of threats, and about the profound shift that came after. After the harrowing experience, she made a photographic series in which she wrote across her own body, “I am not a Victim,” a phrase she still returns to with force. She rejects the passivity of victimhood not because she denies pain, but because she refuses to let it author the rest of her life. “I believe that was the start of an empowerment,” she says. “To recognize the empowered and ennobled warrior within me.”

That phrase, “warrior within,” feels central to understanding both the artist and her art. There is no victim energy in Ashley Collins’ paintings. They do not ask for sympathy or beg for adoration. They ask for recognition. They ask the viewer to meet them with courage. During our conversation, she returned again and again to the idea that “we are warriors,” and to another line that felt equally revealing. “We are all born artists. We have to stay that way.” In her telling, artistry is not profession so much as spiritual state, a refusal to let the world deaden one’s sensitivity, wonder, and instinct for truth.

The same is true of the way she talks about being a woman in the art world. She has spoken bluntly about early dismissals and about the difficulty of being taken seriously on her own terms. But her instinct is not grievance, it is action. “There is a saying that the best revenge is success,” she remarks. She takes pride in having opened doors for others, yet always returns to the same point: if you want to change the world, do the work. Build something. Give something. Lift someone.

That is where her philanthropy comes in, as one of the clearest expressions of her purview. Collins has funded more than 10,000 cleft palate surgeries, along with thousands of vaccines, operations for women throughout Africa, camps for children with cancer, schools for girls in Morocco, and sewing schools in Cambodia intended to help keep girls out of trafficking pipelines. For Collins, charity is intrinsic to her success, not incidental to it. “Abundance is meaningful only if it circulates,” she says with vigor.

She speaks just as frankly about enjoying the fruits of success. She loves vineyards and beautiful cars like the Bentley she poses with in her sprawling studio. She sees no reason to apologize for a life well lived, particularly after the years when even simple comforts were out of reach. But for Collins, luxury without generosity is empty. “Money is one of the most powerful forces in the world,” she says. “It can be used for good, or for evil. The question is balance. Enjoy life, yes. But lift others along the way.” That tension, between beauty and responsibility, glamour and gratitude, is part of what makes her work resonate so widely.

Asked what she hopes viewers in Denver feel when they stand in front of these paintings, Collins does not say awe. She does not say admiration. She says, instead, “Empowerment, ennoblement, and recognizing their own strength and gifts they have to shine.” Then she goes further: “The exhibition is not about me. It is about reminding others of how wondrous and powerful they are.” It is an unusually generous answer for an artist of her stature, and perhaps the most revealing thing she says.

Ashley Collins’ canvases may begin with stories from the past, but her work is not about nostalgia. It is about what survives. What rises. What refuses to be diminished. And that, in the end, is what lingers most powerfully: not just the grandeur of the work, but the force of the woman behind it. Fierce, soulful, unbroken, and entirely her own.