ARTnews, 2014
Essay by Jo Anna Isaak
"The Bellagio Suite"
The Landscape Explored:
Interview by William Forrestall
Telegraph-Journal, 2013
The Aquinian, 2013
NY Arts Magazine, 2007
NY Arts Magazine, 2004
NY Arts Magazine, 2001
Artnet.com, 2001
Review Magazine, 1999
Cover Magazine, 1999
Essay by Jonathan Goodman
"Inklings"
Manhattan Times,
2005
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Illuminated Brush Strokes
Review by Pamela A. Popeson, NY Arts Magazine, March 2004
You know the feeling you get standing under a star-studded night
sky? A sky where you can see nothing but stars from horizon to horizon
and easily even pick out the Milky Way? Where all at once you're
struck by the overwhelming enormity of life and the unsubstantial
fragility of your own puny existence? Where you want to weep at
the inconceivable beauty of life? Where you're breathing all but
stops because it's breaking your heart, this bittersweet-ness, while
pulling it wide open to let in more? Well, that's pretty much the
feeling you get standing in a room surrounded by artist Sky Pape's
new works on paper currently on exhibit in the June Kelly Gallery.
In the exhibit titled "Behind the Seen: Saturated Ink Drawings"
there are ten larger mounted pieces and a number of smaller drawings
and you want to take in everything these pictures have to give.
It's inspiring and it's illuminating and then somehow everything
turns and you're the vulnerable one, you're the naked one. Besides
the universal truths there's personal truths being revealed and
as it turns out they're not just Pape's they're yours too.
Her past work has often reflected an Eastern sensibility and for
these new drawings she use Japanese hake brushes, anywhere from
five to seven inches across, to saturate sheets of kozo paper with
sumi ink. "By going into the paper, behind and underneath the surface,
the drawing gains a unique kind of physicality-seeking out what
lies beyond the surface appearances…" says Pape when speaking about
the effects of her ink saturation technique. Through a series of
sweeping brush strokes that show both meditative restraint and flights
of freedom Pape creates abstract patterns that evoke an intensely
personal sense of the knowing and understanding of the universal
landscape of the spiritual.
When an artist seeks to uncover truths, designedly spiritual or
not, there's always the danger of exposing dogmatic doctrine and
contrived schemes of religiosity instead. There is no need to worry
about that here. Pape reveals a purity of vision through an honest
exploration of personal truths. There's no preaching of prepackaged
utopian paths, just pure art speaking from soul to soul.
The two largest pieces in the show Thesis and Antithesis,
which face each other from a distance across the gallery as if from
across time, share a rhythm and balance that builds upon itself
drawing us into their centers. They bring to mind the sublime movement
of two martial arts masters of the highest order only you are both
standing outside as a witness to the sublime and gone inside having
become the very essence of it. In Insight, a construction
of several smaller adjoined panels, the patterns created by the
brushwork suggests Paleozoic ammonites, evoking all the mysteries
of nature inherent in those ancient forms. In another drawing, Guru,
it seems one can hear the visionary voices of some half destroyed
stone Buddha from the jungle of Angor Wat whispering secrets through
Pape's great lines the way the sun sends light filtering through
the leaves of a great tree or the slats of a palace venetian blind.
In what is considered by many a time of spiritual bankruptcy the
visionary Pape fills the coffers and throws open the doors to the
vaults on pure art that speaks honest truths. And she does it brilliantly.
The exhibit "Behind the Seen: Saturated Ink Drawings" runs
from December 12 through January 13th 2004. The June Kelly Gallery
is located at 591 Broadway and at www.junekellygallery.com.
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