Page 17 - the NOISE May 2014

Affaire de Coeur by Sky Black.
SKY BLACK:
PAINTING SEA AND SKY ANEW
Snow is falling softly through the pines outside the cozy cabin that is home and stu- dio for the young, up and coming Flagstaff artist, Sky Black. Inside, a wood-burning stove keeps the space toasty and welcoming, but it is difficult to settle in because of the many dreamlike worlds that beckon from the walls. His home has become something of a private gallery because his focus has been showing and selling prints in down- town shops and businesses such as Vino Loco and, currently, Mountain Oasis, while amassing a new body of work. The high qual- ity giclée prints are difficult to discern from the originals unless viewed side by side, but are more affordable ($150-$400 as opposed to $750-$4,000) and therefore more acces- sible to the increasing numbers interested in his work. It is also because he considers his paintings his children, forging intimate emo- tional bonds with them over the hundreds of hours it takes to create them, and sometimes hen isn’t quite ready to let them go.
Such is the case with this month’s cover, My Beautiful Friend. The painting is particu- larly significant to Mr. Black because it is a benchmark piece — visual proof of his prog- ress as a painter, and inspiring of a renewed dedication to his work.
Standing before My Beautiful Friend, which takes up nearly an entire wall in his kitchen, there is no denying it. All of his paintings leading up to it are impressive in their own right, but with My Beautiful Friend, Mr. Black has visibly leapt to a new level. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the central figure in the painting is a horse rearing up out of foaming seas, alive with movement, force and wind in its sails.
“This is my baby,” he says. “It represents my commitment to being a painter and taking the next step in my career. I’m spending more time on fewer paintings now, on the detail process, and really put-
ting everything I have into it.”
As with most of his paintings, there are
as many feasible interpretations as there are layers of paint, and in some cases entire other paintings exist beneath the finished piece. In My Beautiful Friend, the horse is both stallion and mare, unicorn and sailing ship, wood and bone.
Writhing seas, skies clear or stormy; birds and beasts; and classically influenced ar- chitecture repeatedly show up in his work. Many of them depict a penultimate moment, where anything could happen next, his paintings posing a question that will never be answered; the infinite possible outcomes to be pondered but never solidified. And always, his paintings have an out-of-time, dreamlike quality that would be a field day for a Jungian analyst.
Mr. Black is often categorized as a surreal- ist painter (though he would prefer a com- parison to René Magritte rather than the common reference to Salvador Dalí), and while his work does appear to spring from unconscious depths, the full extent of their origin and deconstructed meaning from a psychological standpoint are lost on, or irrel- evant to, the artist himself.
It’s not that Mr. Black has a dream and then paints it, but he might retain a feeling from a dream that develops into a painting. “My paintings are my interpretation of feelings and emotions,” he says. “I like to play with a sense of nostalgia, and I love painting paint- ings where there’s not an obvious ending to it or how it’s going to play out, so it leaves a lot of room for interpretation.”
Affaire de Coeur (his first French title and a piece he alludes to having come out of heart- break), depicts a cheetah and a tiger eyeing each other on a pillared platform, with a fai- rytale castle in the hazy distance. Stone casts of the big cats float weightlessly around the animals, as if they just emerged from former shells of themselves.
“This one’s more personal,” he says, break-
ing his rule against sharing his own inter- pretation of his work, but even for the artist there are multiple possible meanings. “It’s about life changes,” he says. “And can prob- ably describe any relationship, new or old, or maybe it’s a love/hate thing. Or maybe they’re crawling out of their old selves, lives, or relationships; and seeing new people or new things. I chose not to do two tigers or two cheetahs — it’s not likely that a cheetah and a tiger would get together, but some- times you find yourself in a relationship like that too — two people who shouldn’t work, but somehow do.”
Mr. Black was born in Flagstaff on San Francisco Street (ironically at home next to the hospital) and split his formative years between Michigan and frequent visits to Ari- zona. Early on, he knew he wanted to be an artist.
“Oil painting was always a fascination to me,” he says. “I was always like ‘I want to do that ... I don’t know why, but I want to do it.’ I could always draw — even in first grade I remember looking at the teacher’s desk and being able to draw it from perspective.”
He started painting in earnest in high school, and when his great grandma Wrenna, who was also a painter, passed, he inherited her oil paints, brushes and tools. “I feel like some of her talent comes out through that,” he says. “I still have her tubes, but I only use them at select times, for the last touches. She’s kind of eternal now.”
Mr. Black is primarily self-taught but is in a constant state of educating himself. “I’m al- ways observing,” he says. “Every time I walk outside, I’m studying color, how light reflects, shadow. Every time I see a painting I’m ask- ing how the artist did it; examining the lay- ers. I experiment with wrist techniques, what brushes to use at which time, what consis- tency of paint ... It’s always on my mind, and like anything, if you practice it enough you’re going to get good at it.”
Mr. Black passed up a full ride to NAU to
BY SARAH GIANELLI
pursue a career in art, and the 22-year old has been able to support himself solely off his art for the past three years, a feat that many artists struggle to achieve their entire lives. His sensitivity, awareness and subject mat- ter reflect a maturity beyond his years, and what eludes him in words, he says in paint. In the twelve by eight foot panel Earth Undone, he has superimposed heavy global symbol- ism of war and disaster, past and present, over a map of the world interconnected by a spidery web. In a more recent piece called Sir Sympathy (something of an anomaly in that it looks like it could’ve been painted by another hand), two cloud-headed business- men are shaking hands. He started it during the government shut down, and it suggests the faceless suits who make deals and deci- sions behind the scenes that affect us all.
At the back of his house is a small studio bright with natural light, where 10 works in progress in various stages of comple- tion await the return of the artist’s brush. A stately lion with branches growing from his mane like antlers keeps a wary eye on an approaching storm, with Grand Canyon’s Vishnu Temple in the background. A nascent form of a reclining woman is part flesh, part mannequin; a white horse bursts forth from a tree trunk amidst a desert flood.
“Sometimes it’s an idea start to finish, like the horse and the sails,” he says. “But things change as I work on it. Sometimes it’s a total journey to find out how it reveals itself.”
On the horizon is a very exciting project that grew out of an exhibition at the Or- pheum last summer called When the Curtains Fall. A Kickstarter campaign is underway to fund a mural on the Orpheum’s east facing exterior wall which, when completed, will be the largest mural in Flagstaff. His vision is to have birds flying out of a grand piano with Grand Canyon in the background. Depend- ing how much money they raise, Mr. Black has plans to involve Flagstaff artist and mu-
>> CONTINUED ON PAGE 18
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • MAY 2014 • 17