Sky Power
Cape Arts Review
by Andre van der Wende, 2009
Sky Power in her Truro studio 2009 – Photo by Berta Walker
Power’s work is rife with metaphors for the physical and spiritual worlds, with Power defining spirit as a life-force that emboldens and drives us.
I first met Sky Power in 1998 after reviewing her exhibition in Truro. Back then, the Texas native showed a little of everything—still lifes, figurative work, and abstraction—all of it sincerely skilled but leaving you wondering where Power was in all of it. The abstract work seemed to have greater resonance and now, eleven years later, Power is deep in the pocket of abstraction, producing openly poetic mid-career work that’s rigorously executed and lyrically stunning.
Even when they’re not, her paintings always feel big. Within fields of strong clean color and forceful gestures of oil paint—drips and splatters rain freely—Power’s work is spirited and energetic, deep and soulful, a winning combination of rapture and reserve.
She lives and works in North Truro, a stone’s throw from the expansiveness of Cape Cod Bay, and while her paintings can play out as an homage to big sky and endless ground, they are in fact more in tune to the internal than external world; deeply meditative, quietly emotive overtures that mirror the spirit and soul. At 58, Power is running the gauntlet of her own creative hot-streak and producing her most mature and confident work yet.
For someone who paints predominantly in the winter and eschews natural light for the artificial, Power displays a strikingly vibrant palette of hot acidic colors that are saturated and fragrant; colors one would be hard pressed to find in the natural world, particularly in the Atlantic Northeast. “It’s not about plein air painting,” she states categorically.
“It’s all from the inside out.” Attached to the dense, meaty novels of Dostoevsky for their psychological penetration, Power has always maintained an abiding interest in psychology that she has in turn applied to her painting. “That’s what comes out,” she says. “It’s my psyche. I learn a lot when I do abstract work. I’m definitely committed to it . . . I’m drawn to it because of the freedom of creating it. I start off from a place with free abandon, let come out whatever may come from my unconscious, and then it becomes a very analytical process at that point. Colors will harmonize, composition will balance, and so on.”
In her studio, three piquant new paintings hang on the longest wall; on opposing walls hang another three, while a litter of canvases and Masonite panels, all in various states of completion, lean against every surface. Congregat-ing generously together in the low narrow space of her studio, they seem to turn up the caliber of light in intensity and temperature, and it’s not long before they all begin to ricochet and hum in a spasm of reverberating color—lime green, deep earthy reds, yards of yellow, and a startling juxtaposition of orange and pink.
Power, Restless Sea, 2009, oil on canvas, 24 x 36”
Looking at a new painting, Power sizes it up, turns it around and around and finally upside down before seeing it anew. “I like it today,” she remarks without hesitation. As the multidirectional barrage of drips and splatters attest, rotating her paintings is something she does often. “This is how they are: they can go in both directions,” she explains.
“With my abstract work, it’s not linear at all. I function more in a sphere . . . The sphere rotates and moves, and that’s how it is, you know? In, out, up, down, left, right; my world is a sphere, it just turns. I can read just as easilyupside down as I can regular, so that’s my reality and that’s how the abstract is, and that’s why I can turn my work one way or another. . . they make interesting pieces.”
Power’s current work came about after she took a two-week ocean cruise. “There’s a theme of water this year in my work,” she explains. “The sea is so compelling. I would look over the edge of the ship and spend all this time looking at the horizon . . .I felt enthralled by the sea. I re-member feeling like the sea wants us. I started having the sense that maybe the Sirens were really the sea.”
Remarkably, she achieves the thick heave and churn of open waters with no local color. There is no blue in any of her paintings,not even a drop. “The interesting thing that’s going on this year,” she says, “is that there seems to be a lot of pastel color in my work.”Pink, lavender, light green, Power herself seems a little perplexed by the trend. “I’m opposed to having a pastel palette for some reason.I’m not sure what that’s all about,” but for now she is honoring that development but mixing the framework of candy colors with a strong counterpoint of assertive earth tones.
Power, Floating the Nest, 2009, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”
Power once titled a painting Life, Death, and Something In Between, and while her new work was initiated by the sea, it is really just another metaphor for her continuing investigations into the nature of spirit and mortality, a paradigm that became more urgent after the recent passing of her mother. “My work for years has been very much about life and death. It’s always sort of been an obsession of mine: contemplating the spirit and consciousness. I think of my work as bridging the plane that we exist in now and the other side. I’m interested in showing the two worlds . . . I feel that’s what’s communicated in my work.”
She points to Checkmate, a painting that was problematic and unfocused until she found its true subject. What looks like a “light, jovial painting,” she says, is quite the opposite. “Quite often my work is about heavy subjects but my interpretation, my expression of the deep subject, is very palatable. The colors are palatable, the language within the forms. This looks like a light piece but really to me, it’s about death: checkmate.”
“I realize,” she says, indicating an area of translucent zinc white above a deep plume of egg-yolk yellow, “that this is the spirit leaving. I see these things as I’m going along, sometimes after ... the story becomes apparent to me when I’m in the middle of it,” giving her the wherewithal to proceed. “I understand more where I’m coming from, what’s coming out of me, then I create more form to it.”
In Floating the Nest, Power had a similar struggle with the duck and weave of strong gestural color overpowering the painting. It all felt like “chaos,” she recalls, a traumatic mirror of the personal change and loss within her own life. “The last thing I did was put this egg shape in,” she says, a province of hope and renewal that “tied it all up. Then it made sense to me.”
Wings, nests, an egg shape, flight, travel, transition, the end of one life, the beginning of another—her work is rife with metaphors for the physical and spiritual worlds, with Power defining spirit as a life-force that emboldens and drives us. “My work of the last number of years has been more about spirit. To me it is the motivator or guide of what we’re doing.”
Sky Power, Checkmate, oil on panel, 24 x 36”
While her paintings can play out as an homage to big sky and endless ground, they are in fact more in tune to the internal than external world; deeply meditative, quietly emotive overtures that mirror the spirit and soul.
What Power is doing is fully adopting the language of gesture and color with a mastery that comes from a slow gaze and a fast hand. There’s a lot of looking but when she strikes, she does so with a discrete kind of minimalism that gives her work a fresh, one-shot look that never falls foul of over-indulgent color. Color remains central to Power’s model, particularly “the buttery yellow,” she says. “That has really stayed with me, first as back-ground color, but then it became a form.” Things shifted two winters ago when she made a trip to Pearl Paint in Boston and was pointed in the direction of Holbein paints, pigments renowned for their consistency and intensity. “I bought a big tube of it! It wasn’t just that it impressed me,” she recalls. “It inspired me! I’ve been stuck on yellow ever since . . . it completely changed my palette, it made my colors electric,” creating a highly keyed color range that can glow and pulse with a tropical sugary buzz.
It’s indicative of her skill that Power, who has worked as a piano tuner and trained chef, gets the measure of her ingredients right,tampering high notes down with subtle earth tones so that things never run amok. Monitoring a viscosity of thin washes that she wipes and reapplies, her paintings may become layered but their surfaces remain flat with a dry, matte patina people often mistake for acrylic. “I have to let them sit because I don’t want to create mud in terms of color,” she says, referring to oil’s slow drying rate; but it also forces her hand to look slowly and look hard; not settling for colorful infatuation and decorative painterly flourishes that can trap an artist into “mediocre work.”
“I’ll do whatever needs to happen to get to that place and if that means setting it aside for a year, then that’s what will happen. If it’s not a strong painting, it’s not complete.” While things can come off as breezy, Power’s process of layering, uncovering, canceling, reappraising, and layering again can be protracted, but it shows an artist patiently allowing a painting to reveal itself like a prescient image that resides within. “I don’t know when a piece is finished until I know it’s finished,” she says, meaning that it’s up to the painting to declare itself. “And I still will try to honor that,” she concludes.
Sky Power’s work can be seen at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown www.BertaWalkerGallery.com An exhibition of her new work entitled “The Beckoning Sea” will open on July 31 through August 16.
