The artwork named “Topez Drive” was finished in 2005 and obtained by the Wallace Trust, a part of Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand. It belongs to a series of swimming pool paintings that also includes “Monterey Key”. The theme of pools is further explored in a woodblock print called “Log rollers”, which is available for purchase in the Prints section.
To see more recent work of swimming pools please check out Log Rollers
Description: Monte Carlo Key oil on canvas measuring 72x120cm. It showcases the artistic style of Collis, featuring an old hydroslide. The painterly technique used strips back the paint, giving the painting an aged look reminiscent of an old facade or a crumbling empire.
This artwork was included in a review by the New Zealand Herald 2005
Bitumen on Paper artwork. A Torn Catalan flag above a fountain. Original artwork by Angus Collis.
Uses of Bitumen in painting and as an art medium
Banksia Avenue Oil on Canvas 100x128cm
Artwork Titled “Lemon Juicer Diamond” 2004 Diptych. Oil On Canvas. 80x160cm. Part of the Show “Ersatz”
Have you ever felt like a square orange getting juiced?
This work emerged from a fascination with materialism and the arbitrary nature of value—how two equally beautiful objects can be deemed worth vastly different amounts simply based on perception and marketing. What transforms a common household tool into something mundane while elevating a mineral fragment to the status of luxury?
Drawing from found imagery used in advertising, the piece explores the seductive power of visual allure—the calculated sparkle and eye-catching glamour that sells us dreams. These are the promises of consumer culture, the manufactured desire that drives our material obsessions.
The composition plays with pop imagery as satire, turning advertising’s own weapons against itself. A humble lemon juicer sits alongside a diamond, both bathed in the same seductive deep blues. In this shared light, their supposed hierarchy dissolves, revealing the absurdity of our material valuations.
The work asks: What makes one object precious and another ordinary? And who decided?
The irony isn’t lost on me—here I am, creating flat representations of three-dimensional objects, critiquing materialism through the very act of making something to sell. Perhaps that’s the point. In a world where everything becomes commodity, even our resistance to commodification becomes… well, a commodity. As a painter, I exist in this constant contradiction: making 2D objects in a 3D world, selling critiques of the very system I’m participating in.
Maybe that’s what makes us all feel like square oranges getting juiced.
For the Man That Has Everything 80x81cm Oil on Canvas