Prairie Pattern

Alan Caswell Collier was a Canadian landscape painter born in Toronto who studied at the Ontario College of Art from 1929 to 1933 under Group of Seven members J.E.H. MacDonald and Franklin Carmichael. After graduation, he traveled across Canada on a relief gang and worked as a miner to earn money for further study at the Art Students' League in New York City from 1937 to 1939, where he studied under Howard Trafton. During his time in New York, he worked as a commercial artist creating advertising illustrations, and he continued to return to mining work periodically to fund his education.

Collier enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1943 and served until 1946, after which he returned to Toronto to continue his career in advertising art while increasingly focusing on painting. His mining background became significant to his artistic development when, in 1951, he returned to the selenite mines where he had previously worked and created a series of paintings depicting the underground work environment from the miner's perspective. He also made annual summer road trips with his wife and son across Canada, traveling by trailer for three months each year to paint landscapes. In 1963, he received a commission from Standard Oil to create eight paintings depicting landscapes along the Trans-Canada Highway.

Collier was elected to the Ontario Society of Artists in 1952 and taught advertising art at the Ontario College of Art from 1955 to 1967, when he left teaching to devote himself to painting full-time. He worked in various media including oils, watercolors, pyroxilin, and acrylic polymer emulsion, and was known for compositions that were masterful in their simplicity. In addition to landscape painting, he created murals for the Toronto agency of the Bank of Canada and Ryerson Institute of Technology, and painted portraits of business and educational personalities, considering his portrait of his wife Ruth to be his finest work in that genre.

Collier's artistic achievements included having his work "Across the Tundra" reproduced as a $2 Canada Post stamp in 1979, and a retrospective exhibition organized by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa in 1971, covering his paintings and drawings from 1935 to 1970. His work is represented in major collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Known for rich colors and strong compositional design, Collier's landscapes captured the diverse regions of Canada with a distinctive sense of pictorial simplicity and directness that reflected the influence of his Group of Seven mentors.