Sky Power: Beckoning Color
Art New England
By Susan Rand Brown May/June 2023
Sky Power, The Gift, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 x 30”
Two thousand twenty-three continues to be memorable for Sky Power, who has lived and worked in Provincetown, MA, since 1976. She exhibits regularly at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown’s home to generations of creatives defining America’s oldest art colony. “Our connection is deep, as is our mutual love of art and color,” Power says of Berta Walker.
Her painting Our Changing Climate (2021) was recently selected for a Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) juried exhibition. A carefully balanced synthesis of abstract and figurative elements presents the outline of a cottage swirling in hues of blue, while waves of yellows and oranges pull from a distance. Dynamic brushy strokes, created with thinned oil paints, lend a symphonic quality to this masterwork.
And now her solo exhibit, Sky Power: Beckoning Color, is on view at PAAM. Christine McCarthy, PAAM’s chief executive officer and exhibit curator, says of Power’s diverse body of work, spanning five decades, “It is driven by strong composition and color-as-form, created in the language of abstraction. Influenced by Hans Hofmann’s students, Power’s paintings seek to show the connection between representational and abstract art.”
In The Tides of Provincetown: Pivotal Years in America’s Oldest Continuous Art Colony (2011) Alexander J. Noelle, assistant curator of European paintings and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, describes Power’s ties to the gravitational pull of the Outer Cape. “Drawn to locales with vast skies and violent seasonal shifts,” Noelle writes, “Power creates paintings that evoke the feeling of a storm on the sea or a burst of clouds in the sky. The rolling waves, veils of haze, and distant vistas of the Cape are powerful sources of aesthetic inspiration.”
The Gift (2016) offers abstraction with a touch of Surrealism, maintaining the lyricism, and translucent colors, of her animated style. “I consider myself a colorist,” Power says. “I dream and thrive in the light, the colors, and the infinite horizon of the Cape.” A white droplet dangles from a string poised on the tip of a gestural zip, while a blue ribbon flirts with cottony pink. For Power, it is a portal into a dream. “I feel my work bridges the gap between me and what is on the other side, the other world.”
— Susan Rand Brown
Susan Rand Brown, a docent at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, is an avid gallery and museum-goer, art critic and frequent contributor to Art New England. She also writes for Provincetown Arts.
