Sky Power grew up in Post, Texas, a town with a year-round population of about 4,000. She spent her teen years in Casper, Wyoming, followed by a move to Seattle to study painting at Cornish School of Allied Arts. She moved to New England in 1972 and arrived in Provincetown in 1976, where she started a horse and carriage business with Laurel Brooke.

Eventually, the business was sold to someone else, and Sky went into a new line of work: local music lovers have Sky to thank for keeping many of the public and private pianos in tune and good working condition.

During the past five years, Sky has re-<:ommitted herself as a creating artist. She has exhibited her work at Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Provincetown Group Gallery, and Tristan Gallery. Her upcoming show is titled The Bardo of Dream. The new paintings are grounded in the delight of bold colors and the challenge of being comfortable in moments of divergence. The dreamscapes are painted in oils on 2' x 2' masonite panels.

"The bardo is a state that is brought about by allowing oneself to experience conflicting feelings and to stay with them rather than letting the rational mind decide that it's either/or. To accept that both extreme opposites can exist at the same time - by allowing myself to stay with those feelings opens up new states of consciousness, and that's the experience of the bardo. It's like a gap or an interval.

"I chose the palette of complimentary colors, specifically red-orange and thalo-blue, because they are opposites in the color spectrum, to emphasize the experience of two extremes. It was an unconscious choice. "In some pieces there's a sense of serenity or excitement. Some have an all-enveloping feeling of relaxation, a state of stillness. In another one, I feel sad but I feel alive and very much in touch with what I'm feeling. Another one is like a cleansing, a release, with a purity in the letting go."

SKY POWER'S THE BARDO OF DREAM Tristan Gallery 148 Commercial St. 508.487.3939 tristangallery.com 7.10-23.02 opening reception Sat.7.13 7-9pm also showing: Katharina Chapins & Pauline Lim

In the diptych I am showing the opposites next to each other. The colors or the forms represent the state of being, whether it's the uncertainty and confusion or the letting go and the peace that results from that."

"By masking the black blue with a covering of deep orange, I was able to create a sense of being enveloped in a field of loud stillness."