THE RAPTURE OF SKY POWER
BECKONING COLOR
Provincetown Arts vol. 38 2023-24
By Andre van der Wende
Sky Power at Work – Photo by Barbara E. Cohen
Painter Sky Power could well have plugged into Tesla’s words, generating her own current of abstraction as a bridge between the physical and spiritual realms.
Over the course of fifty years, she’s produced a deeply committed body of painting that pays homage to past masters while consistently casting its gaze outward—all as a way to look inward—toward her own core of knowledge, if you will.
Power’s art is intuitive, cosmologically, dimensionally expansive. It’s informed by the big-sky country of her Texas upbringing, and the nearly half century she’s lived in Provincetown, finding solace in its own preternatural blend of land, sea, and sky, which she explores through unfettered color.
Her palette has a discernible pulse, an electric charge, that courses through fields of chartreuse and lemon, lavender and purple, deep reds, and even blues. It’s all about immersion, and to be surrounded by Power’s paintings is to luxuriate in their saturated color as a form of sensory ecstasy. It’s one way of inviting you in, but don’t be fooled by their often modest size or the attractive breathy layers of loose brushwork— this is work of extreme depth.
Not quite a retrospective, Beckoning Color—May 5 through June 25 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum—is a rare chance to catch a broad sweep of Power’s work under one roof in a harmonic vibration of color. PAAM’s chief executive officer, Christine McCarthy, curated twenty-five works from 1972 to 2022 that she says “were selected to enforce not only Power’s place within the art colony, but her direct impact as a Provincetown painter. Instead of focusing on one particular series, or body of work, I chose to include artworks from differing series and decades to demonstrate the full scope of Power’s career.”
That approach allows her to thread in a few outliers from Power’s catalogue, such as The Middle Passage (2002), a sobering triptych of physical wooden grids or “bars” simulating the slaves’ view from the hold of a slave ship as the light shifts over three phases. Points of Vision (2004) exploits the textural underpainting of loose brushwork arising from a foggy soft ground of pale yellow and cool white. In both, the color is pushed back or muted, their message and moods specific to the occasion.
Sky Power, Waking Up,1972, acrylic and oil crayons on illustration board, 22 x 30"
It’s the only time Beckoning Color is restrained—the rest of the work is colorful abandon—but what all of it shares is its ability to note a world beyond the impermanence of the earthly plain. Change is constant, and it’s a key function in Power’s work: knowingly or not, she’s able to articulate that consistency while allowing you to reside—just for a moment—in the present.
Born and raised in evangelical West Texas, Power broke away from what she calls its “hypocritical religion, narrow spirituality,” when she moved to Provincetown in 1976. She’s lived here ever since. “Her various jobs—from owning a horse-and-buggy business, to chef, to piano tuner, to gallery director—shaped her creative life, which has resulted in an exquisite body of work driven from nature and the natural landscape of Outer Cape Cod,” McCarthy says. “I commend Sky for her self-discovery—experimenting, studying, teaching, and pushing herself to become a master colorist.”
Her palette has a discernible pulse, an electric charge, that courses through fields of chartreuse and lemon, lavender and purple, deep reds, and even blues. It’s all about immersion, and to be surrounded by Power’s paintings is to luxuriate in their saturated color as a form of sensory ecstasy. It’s one way of inviting you in, but don’t be fooled by their often modest size or the attractive breathy layers of loose brushwork— this is work of extreme depth.
Sky Power, Points of Vision, 2004, acrylic and pencil on panel, 24 x 24”, Private Collection
Not quite a retrospective, Beckoning Color—May 5 through June 25 at the Prov- incetown Art Association and Museum—is a rare chance to catch a broad sweep of Power’s work under one roof in a harmon- ic vibration of color. PAAM’s chief execu- tive officer, Christine McCarthy, curated twenty-five works from 1972 to 2022 that she says “were selected to enforce not only Power’s place within the art colony, but her direct impact as a Provincetown painter. Instead of focusing on one particular series, or body of work, I chose to include artworks from differing series and decades to demon- strate the full scope of Power’s career.”
That approach allows her to thread in a few outliers from Power’s catalogue, such as The Middle Passage (2002), a sobering triptych of physical wooden grids or “bars” simulating the slaves’ view from the hold of a slave ship as the light shifts over three phases. Points of Vision (2004) exploits the textural underpainting of loose brushwork arising from a foggy soft ground of pale yellow and cool white. In both, the color is pushed back or muted, their message and moods specific to the occasion.
The tenure of her commitment to abstract painting, and to Provincetown itself, showcases a remarkable consistency of vision that continues to expand its reach today. Power will be seventy-two this year, her native accent as enduring as the art she’s been making since she first arrived. To witness the fruits of her tenure is to see a steady trajectory of consistency fueled by serious intent.
When we convene in the modest first- f loor studio of her Provincetown home— crammed with as many bursts of color as there are canvases—it’s under the waning half-light of a f lat, gray winter. For the sea- sonal blues Power’s paintings are a pan- acea for the soul, offsetting the seasonal drudgery through their full immersions of color to reveal the depth of an engaged life intimately connected to the natural world.
“The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color,” Power says, quoting Hans Hofmann, and laying out why she wants to be seen as a colorist with all the depth that it confers.
“I’m very much into the color,” she tells me, noting a large painting set on her easel that’s still in the early stages of color falling over itself. “This is how I start my work: with free abandon.” Size doesn’t matter, they all start the same way. “I use big brushes, even on the small works. What happens is, over time, I get very analytical and I’ll be sub- tracting forms, subtracting areas, removing them with other paint so that it becomes a puzzle of addition and subtraction. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about it and studying it before I act.”
Sky Power, The Middle Passage, View from the Ship’s Hull, 2002, triptych, oil on panel, padauk wood, 25 x 25” each
Her work is a combination of spontaneity and the protracted gaze. Looking at a painting with a single egg form hovering within broad bands of oxygen rich red, Power says the painting was mediocre without the egg: “I don’t want to put out mediocre work.”
“To make a strong painting, I’ll let go of what I call the ‘Little Darlings’ that I’m attached to. Setting it aside helps me to know how to act, and not cover up something, which I may regret later on. I’ll paint until I get something that I like, and I may go through a lot of paint—I’ll wipe away and leave a residue, which I love to do.” She points to a soft red corner in one painting overlaid with an affirmation of the same color at its fullest intensity and effect.
Power’s paintings feel abundantly fresh, never overworked. The use of imagery is more pronounced in her later work, with the layers progressively thinner, but no less intense. They’re light and airy, eternally new, cloudy apparitions of color that are physically fixed but visually in flux, an ephemeral haze that coalesces and dissolves simultaneously.
Interior of a Landscape, 2007, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches Permanent Collection, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, gift of Berta Walker
Ground zero for Beckoning Color is 1972’s Waking Up, a mixed-media confection with shades of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning but already tapping into Power’s assertion with strong color and drawing. Today that same fearlessness, as it pertains to inner and outer light, is part of her calling card. Some of her artist friends have pointed out that many of the colors she uses don’t exist in the natural world—but perhaps that is the point. Power’s nonplussed response is to not be confined to just what appears in front of her. “I exist in other realms too. I see these colors so I’m going to use them.”
This third-eye gaze to an ethereal plane is another part of her fingerprint. “My work is a bridge between the two worlds: the material world being the earthly plain; the spiritual world being a more ethereal plane. I live in that plane too.” This brings her back to Hofmann’s notion of the mystical realm influencing the colors she uses. “What he’s talking about are more electric colors that are more about the reflection of light compared to the colors on our more earthly realm, which are much denser,” she says. “In the ethereal realm, they’re lighter, thinner, they’re not dense at all, so it’s more like electrical energy. I was very drawn to electric colors for a long time. I still use them but I’m appropriating more earthy tones now too.”
Utilizing a palette that could become lurid under a less-skilled eye, Power’s work may be influenced by the natural world, but it’s processed in the spiritual realm of the imagination that pushes it toward a super-natural state, a merging of physical and metaphysical worlds that celebrates the connection between all things.
Sky Power, Transformation, 2020, oil and pencil on panel, 11 x 14”, Private Collection
CONGRUENT TO HER PAAM exhibition, Power is showing new work at the Berta Walker Gallery from June 16 to July 8, 2023, what she calls her “typical, colorful Dreamscapes.” Skyscape, seascape, landscape, they’re all the same, she infers—the flats of Cape Cod Bay, the long, low horizon, vast sky. “That’s how it was where I grew up in West Texas: infinite horizon, here and there. I’ve been inf luenced by the weather in both places—whether it’s turbulent or soft—all of it influences my work. My environment influences my work.”
Power’s art adapts to the external world by internalizing it for a landscape of the heart. That may sound trite, although it’s anything but. Is soul a better word? Perhaps, but it’s where she works from, and why she uses visual means for the phantom thread we intuitively know exists but can struggle to tangibly express: the soul, the spirit, a life force simultaneously bound to and separate from the physical world.
“It’s more about my internal world. To me, there is a ‘mystic realm of color.’ I call it ‘the other side.’ My paintings are of the essence. Essence is a more ethereal form of us and everything else,” says Power, acknowledging the interconnectedness between all living things. “To me, the ethereal form of anything—because, to me, the earth is alive too—the ethereal forms of life and essence are of the spiritual world.”
It’s terrain she’s been exploring with the consistency of commitment, giving her art transparency and a quiet grandeur, especially when she does break out on a bigger scale as in the four-by-five-foot Interior of a Landscape (2007). Everything is magnified: the drips flow freely over the fresh pop of colors beneath and around—broad swoops of breathy pink, lemon, and lime yellow.
“So that’s in here,” Power gestures with a hand over her heart. “My ‘interior,’ my envi- ronment, how I feel about my environment, which is a love and attachment. I internalize my environment and experiences. The com- pass of my art is internal. In an abstracted form, my internal world has no limits. That’s why I love abstract art even though it’s just as much work, if not more work, as creating your own forms.”
She uses color to get there, often amplified by the white canvas beneath, which gives an added intensity that envelops you without the colors ever competing with one another— living, breathing pulsations of time and space expressed through sharp yellow and green, bottomless blues, and provocative reds.
“I’m painting up in my studio primarily—I have north light—but I use artificial light and I paint at night, and I paint in the winter, and I come out with these vibrant colors,” she says. They may at times feel turbulent but never chaotic. Colors coalesce and un- fold; time is elastic, measured in dreams, blips, and memory. There’s a distinction to her palette that partly comes from mixing many of her own colors and only working with one at a time.
“Once I paint something I love, I’ll stop, put it aside and then I’ll start looking at other canvases to see if this color would work.” The appearance of spontaneity is actually an involved process, in which she often rotates her paintings, reverses them through a mirror, or takes a series of small digital thumbnails “so that I can see what needs to happen.” Often shunting between fifteen and twenty paintings simultaneously, there’s a rhythm and a conversation that answers each one over time.
Sky Power, The Poet’s Train. oil on canvas, 36 x 48”, Permanent Collection, Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Power often incorporates a pictorial device or imagery—suggestive or specific—that anchors her paintings in a way sympathetic to the colors they’re immersed in and the themes she’s exploring. They never feel like add-ons. In Ikage #28 (2000), from a series of paintings exploring her Cherokee heritage, she uses the geometry of a checkerboard pattern to anchor but not contain the deep bold blues that cover the painting from corner to corner.
In later work, more literal imagery abounds: the uneven zigzag of rooftops, the tumble of short lines and arcs spilling across a horizon that could be Provincetown or any town, the anchor of a safe harbor. She’s looking for that temporal shift often satisfied by inserting a geometry of some kind, or a pictogram that anchors it in reality as much as it does in dreams.
Themes of birth and rebirth, transcendent and earthly journeys, permeate the work. “I’ve gotten more into storytelling,” she says. “I started storytelling with figurative elements. I’ll use these geometric or figurative forms to create structure, to create a stronger composition and more intrigue.”
In one of her most indelible images, The Poet’s Train (2012), a locomotive pulling multiple carriages ascends along an invis- ible track bisecting the sky for destinations unknown. In the more literal but no less poignant Transformation (2020), Power ren- ders a chrysalis and butterfly with specificity and love.
“That chrysalis took me three weeks!” she proclaims, which actually makes sense. Nothing feels rushed and the labor involved speaks to the care Power takes in composition and execution, the balance of abandon and consideration. Everything feels like it preternaturally falls into place with an ease that invites us to stay and linger.
Alongside themes of climate change, death and transition, the spirit world, and personal growth, the pandemic years have pushed the imagery to the fore as she responds to the profundity of life—the joys, the sorrows—confronted at their deepest level. There’s more drawing, and a recent use of charcoal and tiny brushes where the work becomes painstaking and exacting, a kind of contraction in contrast with the expansiveness of the ground in which it’s imbedded.
“My focus is to take advantage of my time here, and to be a more loving person to myself and to others. That’s what I care about, and to me that’s spirituality. I love being out there in nature; I feel like I’m in church. I’m on Earth right now, for a finite period of time. How fortunate I am to be alive.
“That’s why I like abstract art—I can soar internally. It’s so expansive! I do love the freedom of the abstraction. It’s really limitless what we can do.”
ANDRÉ VAN DER WENDE is a writer, painter, teacher, and yoga instructor who lives in Orleans. A native New Zealander, his work can be seen at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. He has written multiple features for Provincetown Arts, including last year’s profile on Bob Henry. For more information, visit AndreVanDerWende.com.
