![[Featured Item Image]](items/The Horseshoe, University of South Carolina (Large, Limited).jpg "The Horseshoe, University of South Carolina (Large, Limited) - © Blue Sky 2006")
Signed Limited PrintOriginal Paintings by Blue Sky |
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![[List Image]](items/Saint Vennie's Kwik Frozen Grits.jpg "Saint Vennie's Kwik Frozen Grits - © Blue Sky 2006") |
"Saint Vennie's Kwik Frozen Grits"#3111 - Studio Painting - Sold! Painting Size: 48" x 70" |
| "Saint Vennie's" is without a doubt, the most important painting Blue Sky has created in the past decade. Hearkening to his earlier career, it follows in his ongoing theme of urban 'interstate landscapes'. It is a theme that generated respect from directors and curators of the Metropolitan, Guggenheim, Smithsonian, & Boston Museums and/ Art in America/. Several decades ago, the Mississippi Museum purchased one of these trucks for their permanent collection. Since then their painting, "Air Brakes" has been the most borrowed and loaned painting in Sky's oeuvre. The importance of this work is understood in the revisiting of an important original theme while emphasizing the progression of the more vibrant coloration of his later paintings. It is a time-consuming process, this development of these assemblages, the reworking of the theme, and the construction aligned with the deconstruction required in this work. Note the broken paintbrushes doubling as handles, the ropes for bars, the whimsical mudflaps over the tires, the scrawled 'passin' side & 'sui-side' above the tail lights, and the working trap door which noisily startles the onlooker if he disobeys the rules written upon it that says "Do not open". As a Post-War painter who eschewed the Abstract movement and continued in his path of realism, Blue Sky has carved his own path in history. Saint Vennie is not an official saint. She's simply been sainted by Sky in his adorning of her head with gold leaf in the renaissance tradition. In the real-life Vennie's devotion to recording oral histories of African-Americans throughout the south, originating and documenting the oral histories of the participants in Brown vs the Board of Education, and publishing photographic histories of her southern culture, she has earned her halo. In "Saint Vennie's Kwik Frozen Grits", Blue Sky was influenced by and inspired by not only the often seen urban and interstate landscape he encounters, and his many travels, but also from his appreciation of African art, the place from which, the paleoanthropologists tell us, we all began. |
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