PERU — Sue Gillio, director of the Music Suite 408, has announced that oil paintings by plein air artist Dana Collins will be featured at the new Music Suite 408 Art Gallery during February 2013. The works are part of a series depicting a year of the changing seasons.

Gillio says, “Dana Collins has exhibited her paintings, drawings and sculpture in over 50 solo and juried group exhibitions in New York, Florida and throughout New England and the Midwest. Her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree was from Washington University, and she received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York. She also studied as an undergraduate at Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and did additional post-graduate work at Arrowmont School, Columbia College, and the University of Illinois. Her numerous awards include the Sisselman Award from the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts and the Sculptor’s Guild Competition in New York.”

The 20 works in the new exhibition are from the past one and a half years. Speaking of this series, Dana Collins says: “Plein air” simply means open air, which is what I am doing in these paintings. I work from direct observation of the sites, mostly from a small rowboat in the backwaters of the upper Mississippi River, though for the current works showing ice and snow I set up my easel in front of the big windows facing the water at my Wisconsin home.”