Color and Energy: Art by Skai Fowler
Loves Passion, Profound, acrylic on canvas
Vancouver-based artist Skai Fowler is a painter who has worked in arts administration alongside her practice for decades. In her personal practice, Skai creates abstract images with a focus on color and energy, covering canvases in saturated, warm hues.
Love's Happiness, acrylic on canvas
I really like the color palette that Skai has been working with in her recent paintings. Looking through the gallery on her portfolio website, I see deep splashes of orange and yellow, tempered with darkened planes of blue and purple. Each painting seems layered, inviting the viewer to closely examine it, following the artist’s brush marks around the entire surface.
Skai's gallery of recent paintings on her portfolio website
Many of these recent paintings by Skai have incorporated more line art, in the form of curved, narrow black lines that scrape across the canvas, sometimes in a buzzing, whirling manner like the mark-making of Cy Twombly. I find in many cases the lines suggest floral forms, though they hover just over the line of abstraction, serving as paths to draw the eye through the work, and to offer a visual anchor for the color.
