Free Abandon: The Abstract World of Sky Power
Provincetown Magazine May 4, 2023
By Rebecca M. Alvin
The titles for Sky Powers’ vibrantly colored abstract paintings come at the very end. But they are far from after-thoughts. “I think long and hard about what I’m going to title them. I want it to be significant,” explains Power in her Provincetown home.
While those with limited experience looking at abstract art sometimes try to “figure out” what they’re looking at by the supposed clues in the titles of the works, such a strategy misses the point because there is no need to lock down one specific meaning or reference point. It is a collaboration between form, line, and color created to elicit a response that has little to do with any representational reality.
A Dream in a Dream (2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 30”)
A painting hanging in her dining room, A Dream in a Dream demonstrates the inner landscape that influences what she paints. While the title does indicate the feeling she is trying to evoke, the feeling of being in a dream, it is not a literal representation of a dream she’s actually had. She uses it as an example to explain her process, which is one that both embraces essential principles of painting and allows instinctive choices to manifest.
“I start off with free abandon,” she explains. Using whatever batch of colors she mixes up that day and a two-and-a-half-inch brush, she brushes the oil paint onto the white canvas in bold, free strokes. Once she has a form she likes, she says she puts on a medium to make it dry a little faster and just leaves it “because I don’t want to have muddy colors and I want to keep the form. So, for example, this one I would have started off with this light pink back here. And then I would have come on top of it with this darker color.” She then uses rags with solvent to wipe away the pigment that she’s put on with a big brush. “Then I’ll have a residue you know, a thin pretty residue,” she explains. “Ultimately I put red on top and left the splatters because I like them. So what I ended up with was two forms that I loved together. Oh my god, I loved those! What next? Well, I don’t know what next, probably for months even sometimes. And then one day I’m looking at it and I envisioned putting an egg shape right in there. So I painted that in there. And that brought it all together. So what I’ll do on the paintings is I’ll just hold onto them until they’re finished. And to me, a finished work is strong. I don’t want to put work out that isn’t what I considered the best I could do with it.”
