Rebecca Skelton

The making and viewing of art is transformative. It is a spiritual experience even more than an intellectual one. The viewer responds first viscerally, with sensuality and emotion. This view puts me out of the mainstream of contemporary art where the art is a ironic statement or a political provocation. I also don't work in a “branded” style or in a single medium.

I work in painting, drawing and sculpture. In painting, I begin my artwork as an experiment with a particular set of colors, or, for sculpture, elements. The goal is to see what sort of expression I can get from the various combinations and the handling of the colors and material itself. The basic result is that much of my work has been nonobjective although it contained suggested forms.

I consider the goal of abstraction to be the most difficult and the pinnacle of the use of art as an visual language. And although much of the art I have been working on lately appears to be figurative, I will always consider myself primarily an abstract artist.

Probably because I have always been interested in drawing people, the recent painting and sculpture is figurative. For most of my adult life, I have drawn regularly from a model. Most of that time, the drawings were just to keep my eye sharp and fingers nimble.

In my drawings, I try to honestly portray the human condition through the human form. Some of them are drawn directly from the model while others are re-worked from memory. The medium varies depending on the particular emotion I am trying to convey. Many of them are on handmade paper recycled from old drawings (combined with shredded mementos and souvenirs.) In these drawings, it is my intention to capture the experience and energy from the past drawings and channel them into the new drawings. These second generation pieces do seem to have a feeling of depth and history. Some drawings are made on a heavy paper that allows me to carve nervous working lines into the body of the paper and redraw a more composed or resolute image on the surface. Other drawings become layered by my drawing and erasing several times until the new image wins over the earlier ones. All of them suggest a sense of mystery, elapsed time, and motion. These psychological elements convey recovery, perseverance, and transformation.

Because I have so often practiced life drawing as a discipline and a release from the demands of painting, it was probably inevitable that the figure would eventually emerge in my paintings. The added layer of symbolic forms complicates the underlying meaning of the material. The new levels of meaning enrich the elemental structure of the paintings.

I have tried to intertwine the abstract with the images and the ideas. In my paintings, the visible world is not my point of departure, it becomes my point of return.

Because of the way I approached a painting in the past, different subject matter emerged out of the initial chaos on each canvas. However, there were images that recurred sporadically. One of the most persistent of these images is three female figures. They have variously been barely suggested or tightly described; they have appeared in many forms for many years. I decided to pursue these images with the intention of interrogation, to find out what they might mean or where they might lead me.

I call this group the Rondo Series:

“Rondo” is a musical term defined by Webster as “an instrumental composition typically with a refrain recurring four times in the tonic and with three couplets in contrasting keys.” Although this series is not a visual representation of the musical form, it has the refrain of the arranged figures shown in contrasting treatments. In the Rondo paintings, I have approached the canvases differently. Instead of initiating the process with random marks, I was determined to use a loose framework of the same basic composition and imagery for all. I wished to discover to what different destination each similar endeavor would lead. And, as usual, each painting had its own ideas about how it wished to be developed.

In the past, I have started with the idea of using a certain palette, Rondo marks my beginning for using a certain structure or image as the point of departure. In this case the women are both structure and image to the point where the women change from being women as symbols or archetypes and become simply the underlying structure. (Women as underlying structure is symbolic in itself.)

My motto: “Fire knows only the laws of fire,” is a quote from my best friend Katherine back in 1968, (spoken under very odd circumstances, but that is another story.) But the idea has had resonance with me all these years. Applied to painting: From the first searching mark placed on a canvas, the painting begins to define itself more and more narrowly until there is no more to discuss. Paint knows only the laws of paint and the image knows only itself as it struggles to emerge. Each is like a willful child growing into an independent image. And the motto also applies to drawing. (Sculpture also knows the laws of physics.) Any element behaves only as its particular state of being allows it to behave. And each piece of art demands its own format. Certain expressions require the color from paint or the limited palette of traditional drawing, while others require three dimensions, or the so-called 4th dimension of motion/time or interaction. For this reason, my work is varied. Each new piece cries to be its own event.

I have always loved looking at sculpture in its many forms, but it has only been in the past few years that I have started to work in the medium. While some of my early sculpture included viewer participation, I wanted to continue my Rondo theme in sculpture, and for several years, the women kept the concept going.

I used images from my paintings and linear marks from my drawings and worked them in three dimensions. I have worked in metal and textile as well as by traditional means in order to create unique forms. I also like to combine weaving with welding to combine “women’s” work with “men’s” work.

But while I was building these figures out of their various anatomical sections, I admired how each compartment was an interesting abstract shape in and of itself. Recently, I came full circle and the sculptures, although related to the women in terms of form, are now abstract.

As for the paintings under construction now, they are still figurative, but are still also primarily color experiments. They all can be described as being matt and gloss black paintings and the basic imagery is women with horses.

A number of themes have recurred in my work. And although the work seems to be all very different while I am doing it, there are arrangements, colors, shapes, lines that echo each other from medium to medium and through time. The interest in figure, horses, experimentation, texture, abstraction combined with images, groups of three, sweeping lines, broken color, compartmentalization and grids all combine in different ways at different times.

I have no plans to be fenced into any one way of working. I do not need to be labeled. As long as I feel my work transforms me, it will transform the viewer, and it will continue to transform itself.