Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present, The Mountain Pass, an exhibition of new paintings on paper by Sky Glabush. The Mountain Pass is a follow up to Mount Temptation, which examined the role and the development of motifs in Sky Glabush’s work-on-paper practice.
For almost four decades, Sky Glabush has explored art-making as a route for external observation and personal self-discovery. Glabush makes paintings and works-on-paper that offer viewers an opportunity to examine interiority through an encounter with exteriority as figured in the language of painting. In looking at Glabush’s painted objects, in considering their very materiality, we witness light, color, composition and texture – an experience that in some sense mirrors Glabush’s own.
Speaking about his work, Sky Glabush notes, “There is no recipe, there is no formula, there is no direction. I never know if and when a painting is going to feel real, or if it is going to feel like it is alive…The materials themselves have to guide the painting. The materials have to present an image or an idea that did not come from me.”
Glabush’s open attitude finds realization in three major paintings on paper included in “The Mountain Pass” – a dense copse of trees, a view over a mountain valley, stars over pines at night. The spaces in these works stretch before us. Sky Glabush balances dense layers of information against a feeling of immediate presence.
What is space in picture? In ourselves? Glabush puts this question forward constantly by way of an investigation of motif and pictorial space as place in which to locate being. “Space equals consciousness,” Alan Watts says, going on to point out the complexities of figuring artistic expression in words and pictures. “While we shape clay into a pot, it is the emptiness inside that holds we want; we hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable; we work with being, but non-being is what we use,” Lao Tze writes.
Sky Glabush offers a description of how he approaches painting and the studio: “The last four or five years I have become more entranced with dealing with the landscape as a kind of platform for experimentation and abstraction…What I’m trying to do when I am [in nature] is kind of absorb a feeling…And I am always trying to push the paintings to a place where I lose the connection to my own source material or my own experience. I get lost in the process and then when I find it again – when it kind of comes to life again – then it comes to life for the viewer, too.”
Glabush’s large-scale paintings immerse the viewer in a nearly one-to-one transcendent experience; his works-on-paper evoke an intimate, considered process of deep concentration and reflection. Drawn from experiences hiking in the mountains of Switzerland, the woods of Ontario, the fields of Majorca, the pieces in “The Mountain Pass” map the internal and the exterior world, and engage us in a feeling of life realized.
