Portrait of an artist

Measuring the Sun

A Conversation with Sky Power

by Lynn Stanley

Sky Power met me at her home and studio in Truro, a spot surrounded by trees off a pollen-coated road the color of sulfur. Rachel, her greyhound, had dug a cool hole in the dirt in front of the stairs and Power told me to watch my step as I entered the house on the way to the studio. Power explained that she also had a workspace downstairs for woodworking around the time of the fire at Whaler's Wharf and that was ever-present in my mind.

I asked Power if she had lost work in the fire. She explained that during the late fall and winter she had taken over the take-out restaurant space of Lorraine's Cafe Too and dubbed it Sky's Home-Made Lunch. "I was there by myself 'serving homemade breads and soups; I cared very much about the people there. So that came out in the painting.

"With some of my work I start off with a very definite and for paintings that demanded large flat spaces to dry. She directed me to a chair in the center of the studio and for the next hour and a half talked, in her soft Texas drawl, about her work, her family and her life on the Cape. During out talk she never sat, and I wondered if she might be getting fatigued. I soon realized that this is not a woman who tires easily. As well as maintaining a business as a piano tuner she has four shows of her work planned in our area this summer. She pointed to works in progress that will appear in her Provincetown Group Gallery show. I asked her to share her process as an artist and to recall how she found her way to the Cape. "I work in oils and acrylics, both figuratively and abstractly.  It's important for me to think about how a group of paintings is going to look together so I tend to think in terms of series."

Power explained that the work often reveals itself to her as she goes along. "I see things in my work later on that relate to what's going on in my life or things from the past. "For instance, I did a self-portrait this winter, which I worked on for a few weeks. When I was finished I realized that I had painted a nighttime sky with fire behind me. The high contrast on my face looked like the light at a fire scene. I was painting: idea in mind, whether the piece is realistic or abstract. I think about the design, the color and I also care very much about the emotional effect that a piece has, like music. When I work I love to listen to jazz: Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane.

Like many artists who like to work figuratively, Power often does self-portraits, "because I'm always available," she smiled. "I often combine the figure with abstract elements. And more recently I've gotten into a series I call Dreamscapes." As she spoke Power showed me a dreamscape in three parts, a vertical triptych she had recently finished entitled "Death, Life and Something In Between." The paintings, done in vibrant shades of blue, lavender and cadmium yellow, depict simple horizons which feel simultaneously familiar and alien.

Some contained varying brush strokes that hung in the dream-sky and reminded me of what Susan Rothenberg has called the emotional and physical weather of a painting. Power described them as landscapes of the unconscious. "Death is a theme of mine. I've lost a number of friends to AIDS over the last decade and I also have family members-for instance, my grandmother is going to be 94-and I'm afraid of them dying too. And I think about myself as well. I have much I want to do."

Power showed me a piece that had been inspired by a postcard with a poem by Emily Dickinson, sent to her by the poet Richard McCann while he was convalescing from a serious operation. My loss by sickness, was it loss? Or that ethereal gain one earns by measuring the grave, then measuring the sun. I had seen the use of text in some of Power's work and I asked her to talk a bit about it. "Well I've never used a poem before this, in my work. But my younger sister is a poet, and she turned me on to Frank O'Hara and the idea of a merging of poets, musicians ,and visual artists. So she and I have been talking about collaborating. But I'm interested in using text in my work."

She pointed to a colorful abstraction that intrigued me, with the phrase "Softly, I Suppose" written in pencil in one corner. "This work came out of an e-mail conversation I had with my sister around the time of the great snow storm last April 1997. During the night a tree had fallen on our roof, weighed down by the snow, but we didn't hear it. As I wrote her I told her the tree had fallen 'softly, I suppose.'" This phrase, Power explained, inspired two works of the same title.

Another piece which uses text, "These Trees," shows a delicate pencil study with oil pastel of a tree, with the text serving as a landscape element. Another cryptic "letter tree" stands to the right of the composition. Power explained that the letters revealed themselves as a kind of code, spelling 'caged' backwards. "I didn't think about making a code while doing the piece, or even the word's meaning, but I was feeling really caged at the time. I was wanting more freedom."

Some of Power's works combine her skills as a woodworker. One piece, entitled "Just Another Word" incorporates padouck, a reddish-purple wood from Malaysia. In the piece' two abstractions are combined with a panel of the wood; its grain and color become central to the work's composition. She explained that she was self-taught and had' made her living for a time as a woodworker, a profession she has moved away from as she pursues her career as an artist. "I only have so much time, and custom woodworking takes a lot of time. I'm giving that time to myself now."

I asked Power to talk a bit about her Texas roots. "I grew up in a little town called Post, with a population of about 4000. The town was founded by C.W. Post, of Post Cereals." Powers explained that her family went back a few generations in the town. One grandfather had been a sheriff, another a county judge. "We moved to Wyoming when I was 13 and although I was very upset at the time, I feel very fortunate to have left there," she smiled, "because most of my peers were pregnant before they were out of high school. I'm grateful to have those roots but I'm more grateful I was pushed out and became part of the bigger world."

Power moved to the east coast at nineteen and came to Provincetown in 1976 to start a horse and carriage business with a friend. That winter she worked cutting scallops, a job that entailed rising at dawn and standing for 12 hours in front of a bucket in the icy air by the breakwater. "You were paid $10 a bucket and if you were good, you could do a bucket an hour." The cold and lack of winter work proved too much, however, and Power moved back to Texas.

She returned in 1982 and, except for a time in California, she decided she would struggle through the seasonal work and find a way to stay here and make art. Clearly all the hard work and dedication has paid off. "I want my work to be about harmony, to open people up when they view it, the way nature does when you're in it." As Power spoke she continued to show me paintings, many of them shot through with brilliant yellows, a color she is favoring in her palette now. I thought of Dickinson's poem and began to understand how someone might measure one's life and death and that bright planet that shows the road to everyone.*

*From "The Inferno of Dante," translated by Robert Pinsky, 1994, The Noonday Press

Sky Power's work can be seen through July 16th at the Provincetown Group Gallery, 465 Commercial St., 487-8841. She will also be featured through August at Lorraine's Cafe, 229R Commercial Street and at the Boatslip Restaurant, 161 Commercial Street, Aug. 17- Sept. 13.