TRANSCENDENT ENERGY
SKY POWER ARRIVES IN THE SPOT LIGHT
Artscope May/June 2023 Cover Story
By Lee Roscoe
Sky Power, Passing Through, 2022, oil and charcoal on canvas, 24 x 30”
With the transcendent energy which exists behind the real world emerging onto her canvases, Sky Power’s paintings seem almost to be vision quests, dreaming the real world into another realm, filtering that so-called “real”world into a dream, or that space in which Crazy Horse was alleged to have lived — the dimension beyond whatwe see, what allegedly, “is.” Somehow what she captures in her light and color-filled abstractions is very moving.
Such works as, “Passing Through,” oil and charcoal on canvas, 24” x 30”, which pictures a floating piano, an entry to crypt, a flower, what could be desert and mountains and sky, with an arroyo or wash nearby, pulse with a vital urgency of mortality. Or “Shelter,” oil and charcoal on canvas, 24” x 30”, vivifying the earth and sky colors of pink and green, with strange, almost birdlike shapes emerging from the mating of sky and earth. Or “Last Quarter Moon,” oil on canvas, 24” x 30”, the half-moon accompanied by books and a painting, set above the sky. Or “A Dream in a Dream,” oil on canvas, 24” x 30”, the rock of first- being squeezed between primary colors emerging from the universe. Or “The Flats (High Summer),” oil on panel, 11” x 14” — sun screaming from the sun on sand into its own shadow at the hilled horizon. Fusing the external world with her internal life, the intimate with the infinite, spirit with form.
Growing up in small-town Texas, Power’s mother, who was herself an artist and musician, encouraged Power with classes beginning at age 7, where, remarkably, she learned perspective and how to use oils by copying reproductions of famous paintings. She began to find an artist’s identity. “It’s not an easy life,” she said, but she is driven to create, and has done so through many moves — from Texas to Wyoming, from west to east, eventually in the1970s to Provincetown (after turning down two prestigious academic institutions who wanted her in their ranks in Boston). She ran a horse and carriage with her partner for a year, then trained as a piano tuner, and used her self-taught skills as a carpenter to survive, working during the day in those trades, and as a cook at night at Napi’s restaurant. Eventually having her first show at a nearby gallery, which is where Berta Walker discovered her.
She’s got the Texas accent and the credentials, descended from her county’s founder, a sheriff and deputy marshal. She has verified Cherokee heritage, but said she grew up in “white culture” where being native was (sadly) an embarrassment. But that indigeneity, as well as the places she has lived in, inhabit her art, filter up through her. Recently a native actor I am working with said that ancestral memories inhabit us, even if one is not steeped in one’s culture, and that may be true for Power, who intuited the very indigenous concept of the “interrelatedness of all things, that there are forces more powerful than human beings.”
Speaking of her sense of place (it infiltrates so much of her art) she said, “The environment has always affected me. West Texas is flat, like here on the Cape, but there the sky is infinite, here it is the ocean. Wyoming has the big sky but also the mountains. We lived below Cap Rock in Texas; these gigantic clouds would come over, I could feel the electricity in the sky, which was tinged with yellow, so quiet I could hear a bird fly; this preceded the weather, often tornados.” Provincetown inspires with its sky as well, the pastel colors of the light or rather the texture — the softness and clarity of it, she said. Power’s art is a way for her to discover herself: “it showsme who I am. And who the world is, who the divine is; It shows me who I am in connection to the earth and the spiritual. Painting is a way to go there. It connects me to everything that exists, and I am part of that. It’s a door.” One series, “Self and Other,” let her investigate who she was in relation to other humans. In another series, she may see who she is in relationship to the earth and ocean, or what feelings the vulnerability of the dreaming state put her in touch with. And those feelings, what she is going through, become represented in the paintings. In May and June, Power will have a solo exhibition at Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) titled “Beckoning Color” of 25 paintings curator Chris McCarthy, PAAM’s executive director, chose from over a hundred of Power’s creations. At Berta Walker’s gallery she will have another show, “Reflections Through Color.” “During the pandemic I started storytelling in my paintings. Many of my friends and family have died the past few years (not from Covid). What this series revealed to me is that I want to keep telling stories in my paintingsand thrive and survive. I have more to learn and give.”But — what the artist discovers may not be what the viewer sees — and that is the fascination for me. “I have way too much red and yellow in my paintings,” she says. But those colors come to her. “I don’t decide to paint with bright colors. I start off with free abandon, mix a batch of color, use two and a half inch brushes and whatever color I connect to that day. (I waste a lot of paint, but I don’t care. Even if I remove most of it, it will show as underpainting which is very important.)” With bold brush strokes she intuitively creates a formshe likes and sets it aside to dry. She moves to the next blank canvas. It’s an organic process. She then analyzes what she has, looking at it from different angles, even reflections in a mirror or a small photo, deciding then what it calls for. Which may be more representational. “It’s like a puzzle. That’s what abstract art is: we create our own structures.” She doesn’t know where it comes from, but she follows the lead of where her brush and colors take her. Same for her name, Sky. Her surname is in fact Power, but her name, Sky, just came to her when she moved from the west to the east. “It changed my life; people would ask me about my name, and I had to get over being so shy.” With the love of the huge skies in the places she has lived, perhaps the name is inevitable. Gallerist Berta Walker said that Power is the future, expressing the brightness of a new rise out of Covid. “Sometimes people can’t handle it when an artist puts their whole truth, their whole soul out there. But as consciousness changes, as we become more conscious, people are opening to her work. She’s painting other dimensions. If people are open to it, they will get it.”
- Lee Roscoe
