RELINQUISHING

PHYSICS

WRITTEN BY PENNYLANE SHEN

Artist Consultant, Curator & Educator
Director, Dazed & Confucius

If you were to visit Skye at work in her studio, there is a great likelihood you would discover her wearing a floral print not entirely dissimilar from her paintings. It’s a telling image—not just of sound sartorial choices, but of a painter who very much embodies her practice and subject matter, a painter who lives her work and whose work lives and moves and breathes as a result of the steadfast conviction that in a flower is the heart of life.

In the work is an urgent, even painful need to express the vitality that is Skye’s persistent source of inspiration. The most powerful articulations of the world’s beauty are often shot through with pain: loss, lost love, love unrequited, the uncertainty of change. The artist confronts these dangerous times with luminous bursts of creativity that wrest from the darkness a light of grace and salvation.

In this manner, Skye’s abstract works distance themselves from a canon of floral still lifes and landscapes and instead seize upon the rebellious energy of rock and jazz funk along with the lush, soulful atmosphere of modern R&B. Employing the sufficient amount of iconoclasm, vibrant pinks and shimmering marines can be recognized in parallel with deep, mysterious blues and greens, but all flattened and purified as they achieve distance from objective subject matter. Equally, while there are present on occasion serene patches of calm, there are also frenetic yet elegant whirls of pure light—as if a particle accelerator relinquished physics to paint flower petals.

Stillness in motion, tranquil turbulence: in the chaotic beauty of Skye’s painting practice are those golden paradoxical moments ever ready to guide us.