Tapestry Artist Carpets His Own Road to Success : Commentary: The self-taught Keith Collins uses remnants of rugs to create artworks coveted by celebrities. And he works totally outside the system.

The end of the Cold War signaled the coming of a new kind of culture and--as a natural extension--a new kind of artist.

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Observers are aggravated by their inability to predict what new art will look like or who will make it. Will it be computer art or graffiti art? Will general cultural trends make it more conservative, more populist, less intellectual and more entrepreneurial than in the recent past? Will its masters be members of minority groups?

When such questions are finally resolved they invariably reveal that the sought-after art and artists were already there. We just looked in wrong places.

Keith Collins may not be one such, but what he has accomplished is so offbeat, pertinent and admirable that he’s worth attention on his own merit. Moved straight into a museum of contemporary art and wrapped in an essay about American popular culture, his best work would play as seamlessly as that of many better-known artists and might appeal to a considerably larger audience.

Entirely self-taught, Collins, 39, makes tapestries out of carpet remnants. He virtually reinvented the technique as an expressive tool, adapting it from his Aunt Mabel’s habit of fashioning little throw rugs from castoffs. In the beginning, he scavenged his materials from dumpsters, burrowing through strata of coffee grounds, cereal boxes and the occasional rat.

A native Southlander, he was born in San Pedro and educated in Los Angeles schools, including Daniel Murphy High and Cal State L.A. Reared a Catholic, Collins now regards himself as a Christian and ascribes his success to his faith. His father, Dr. James Douglas Collins, is a distinguished radiologist who practices and teaches at UCLA. Expecting his son to follow him into the profession, Dr. Collins was severely underwhelmed when the kid decided to be an artist.

Collins thinks his own professionalism and resilience came from his folks. To get started, around 1974, he sold his beloved ’56 Porsche to buy materials and rent a studio. It promptly burned down. He recouped by winning $11,000 on a TV game show and gave it to a business partner, who promptly lost the bundle. He bounced back again, constructing his own portable booth for a crafts fair. It collapsed. Nothing sold. He just kept trying.

Today the artist has five children of his own, lives in Baldwin Hills and runs a studio in the Pico-Union district. He conceives of himself as being like an orchestra conductor, using assistants and graphic designers to help execute his ideas. All his assistants are guys from the neighborhood.

They assemble his tapestries like jigsaw puzzles, and the results are surprisingly rich, varied and unself-consciously reflective of ideas from mainstream art. Collins started modestly by making custom floor mats for exotic cars. Now, with the help of designer Richard Pietrusca, he does big tapestries depicting sports cars, landscape, wildlife and portraits. Precisely executed, they closely resemble photo-realist painting, with a special twist. The texture of the carpeting creates an atmospheric haze that makes the best of the works border on dimensional hallucination.

Collins’ magnum opus is a recently completed image roughly the size of a tennis court. A site-specific installation in the museum Otis Chandler established in Oxnard, the Vintage Museum of Transportation and Wildlife, it depicts bears, mountain goats and other big-game animals in Alaska’s Denali National Park. Mount McKinley looms in the background; art buffs are tickled by the works’ Albert Bierstadt Manifest-Destiny grandeur blended with a very contemporary feel of light and space. Collins’ art welds traditional tapestry-making to the gee-whiz delight of cinematic special effects.

Starting with little craft fairs in Westwood, Collins has dealt with an audience that can afford to buy what it likes without having to answer for taste. At first his admirers were just everyday folks who didn’t care; now they’re rich and famous. Collectors include such mega-stars as Michael Jackson and his sister Janet, Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arsenio Hall and Bill Cosby, such sports figures as Mike Tyson, Eric Davis and Jack Clark and such fellow entrepreneurs as Otis Chandler and Enzo Ferrari. He did Malcolm X’s portrait for daughter Atila Schabaz. He depicted Bugs Bunny with Mel Blanc--the voice of many famous cartoon characters. Collins still has a victorious image of Mohammad Ali that a collector couldn’t pick up because he went to jail.

Collins unabashedly believes as much in the art of venture capitalism as in the art of art. He obtains most of his commissions by targeting a client, then presenting them with a highly personalized work he’s completed on pure risk speculation--a portrait, a scene from their kids’ favorite fairy tale. Collins’ prices range from $2,000 to $200,000, a fairly stiff sum for a work by an artist completely lacking the prestige of art world credentials. Most collectors require that cachet to insure a safe and status-affirming investment.

The fact that Collins has succeeded entirely outside the mainstream system may be the most important thing about his career, aside from the intrinsic interest of the work. Artists have been dissatisfied with the established dealer-collector-critic-curator loop for decades because it seems fickle and exclusive.

Collins’ willingness to cater to clients is also significant. It points to the fact that a small galaxy of art worlds already exist out there, not just one. Each tends to appeal to a special interest like Western art or art about sports, nature or whatnot. If the future sees the growth of a number of cellular art worlds, that would be a logical extension of current cultural fragmentation.

One the other hand, maybe Keith Collins is just another bracing American individualist rugs-to-riches success story.