The name was his.
He left it behind on purpose.

Bob Collison was the kind of man who couldn’t look at a creek without wondering what would float. In high school he’d engineer little boats out of grass, sticks, and tin cans — then test them on the water like a one-man naval yard. He doodled. He played ball at a level most people only watch. He built things with whatever was in reach, because his mind wouldn’t let him leave the world as he found it.

When he became a father — four kids and counting, a house, a yard, a life to run — he bought a Collie dog named Rowdy. Not just because he was a good dog. Because of the name. Collie. Collison. He put the family name on something living and let it run.

I was the fourth. A baby in diapers, toddling around the front yard while Bob washed the car. Rowdy would find me every time I drifted toward trouble — long snout pressing against my diaper, pushing me back up the hill. No playpen needed. Rowdy had it handled.

I’ve been Collie ever since. And when I put that name on my art — on every piece of metal I cut and bend and weld in the Arizona desert — I’m not being sentimental. I’m being accurate. That name has Bob Collison all over it.

It didn’t start with me. It started with a woman named Collie — Bob’s grandmother, my great-grandmother — who lived out her final days in Canton, Ohio, bedridden in my grandparents’ home, while my older sisters snuck upstairs just to be near her. Her name meant enough to her grandson that he put it on a dog in a front yard in Missouri, so it would follow his kids around for the rest of their lives.

This family has been making things with their hands for as long as anyone can trace it — on the Collison side and the O’Brien side both.

My mother Colleen could sketch anything on the back of a napkin mid-conversation — casual, offhand, brilliant. My sister Sheila never took a design class in her life, but when she built her dream home and people walked through it room by room, they couldn’t find the words. Kev works in watercolor — delicate, detailed, and quietly playful, the kind of work you lean in close to fully understand. Guy paints in oils the way Bob engineered boats — bold, loose, sometimes so far ahead of the moment it takes a minute to catch up.

Nobody assigned us a medium. We each found the one that fit the way we think.

Mine is metal. I cut, bend, weld, and grind in the desert heat — where the light is unforgiving and the material has opinions. The ideas don’t always feel like mine. I’ve learned to pick up the torch when something moves me and trust where it goes. That’s where every piece starts — inspired by God, shaped by nature, arriving through fire.

Every piece that leaves this studio carries a name that belongs to a woman in Canton, Ohio, to a man who tested boats on a creek, to a baby being pushed up a hill by one very dedicated dog, to a family that has never once looked at raw material and seen anything other than possibility.

— Gregg “Collie” Collison  ·  Chandler, Arizona