Excerpt from Odd Nerdrum School Application Essay
As a student painting with acrylic Sky’s images were grandiose and expressive. Her paintings, however, appeared to be illustrative; canvases full of hard edged shapes with everything filled in. The redeemable quality of these images were the vigor of the brush strokes which gave the painting an energy. A sense of color theory, which strayed far from the norm, also imbued her paintings with a fresh quality. Yet, the images remained flat with no illusionary depth that went further than the surface of the canvas.
For years Sky’s work remained in a place of experimentation even as her chosen medium changed from acrylics to oil paint. The images were small, stylized, and lost the expressive brush marks that her work once achieved. Her lack of knowledge about the medium caused her resort to illustrative tendencies. Instead of expressing a tree with a type of painterly freedom the result was a stiffness. She retained the same problems as before while accumulating new ones.
Today, as a semiprofessional, her work is rapidly evolving using multiple styles leveraging varying techniques. There are four major series to look at. The abstracts as well as the impressionist styled landscapes have a quality that show pure artistic expression through a deeper understanding of color theory and a new freedom of mark making. The flower realism paintings are a clear practice in painting value and depth through an object that interacts with its surrounding space. Finally, there is the style most notably recognizable as a Rockenbach which are the geometric landscapes. The major quality of this subject is the play between form and abstraction to represent the simple transitions of multidimensional space.
The best work to have come out of her collection encompassing all of these traits is “Lady in the Lake” (2019): the image of a woman deep in the forest laying half in and half out of the water with glowing geometry radiating around her head. For once there is a quality that is noticeably different from work of the past and the viewer can sense an attention to depth, color, contrast and a confidence in mark making. There is still, however, much room for improvement.
Her goal, through hours in the studio and persistent experimentation, is to rise above the ranks of a semi-professional painter. A craftsman should know that their life is a pursuit for improving ones self as well as their practice. The fundamentals are the means of using paint on canvas to create a work that is more than just an image of an image, but rather a deeper illusion of space and time. But to break beyond the fundamentals is to learn how to see. With seeing comes whole understanding. With understanding one can achieve one’s goals.
By Sky Rockenbach, January 2020