Dayna Collins's fiery red hair sets the tone for how she makes her art and lives her life. She is an energetic, intuitive, abstract painter working in oil and cold wax. Her intuitive abstract paintings reflect her love of wild color, curiosity, playfulness, and joyful spirit – with a smidge of sassiness and irreverence to keep life interesting. She works in layers, applying swaths of colorful paint, then going in and scraping away portions of the paint, drawing and digging, making marks and lines, and then adding more layers of paint as a composition begins to emerge.

As a collagist, her mixed media pieces reflect the passage of time, repurposing book scraps and found ephemera, transforming the aged and tattered pieces into something unexpected and beautiful, celebrating their fragile decay. She delights in painting on paper to use in her contemporary collages.

Dayna shows her art in three Northwest galleries: Guardino Gallery in Portland, Salem on the Edge in Salem, and RiverSea Gallery in Astoria. Her work is on display at two NW boutique hotels, The Independence and The Dundee. Her work has been published in several books, including “Cold Wax Medium,” by Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin, “Wabi-Sabi Painting with Cold Wax,” by Serena Barton, “The Mixed-Media Artist,” by Seth Apter, and the college textbook, “Art for Everyone,” published by Oxford University Press. Dayna has taught throughout the Pacific Northwest, including at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Creative Arts Community at the Menucha Retreat Center in the Columbia Gorge, for the San Diego Book Arts, and numerous times privately throughout Oregon and Washington.