Christopher Skura displays bold new work in his “Social Studies” exhibition at Art Center Sarasota, which also represents a homecoming. Here’s the backstory.
Sarasota had an explosion of independent creativity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Dude Ranch was at the epicenter, but there were no cows or cowboys on the premises. This “ranch” was a loose collective of seven Ringling College “dudes,” Skura among them. When these multitalented individuals weren’t creating visual art, they were playing in a punk rock band. That’s how I ran into Skura at a few of my stand-up gigs. I also wrote about his art for The Sarasota Arts Review. He got my jokes. I liked his work.
Skura’s art was mainly sculptural at the time. His pieces struck me as elemental, not primitive. He succeeded in getting to the heart of things.
At the cusp of the millennium, Skura moved to New York City. In 1995, he started out as a production manager at the Guggenheim Museum. After an apprenticeship with Dr. Charles Von Nostitz, restoring priceless paper artwork became his forte. It still is. Skura now works with Alvarez Conservation services, a firm specializing in high-end investment art. That includes damaged masterpieces by Calder, Birchfield, Matisse, Leger and others. These pieces flow through Skura’s hands on a daily basis. The studio where he works isn’t far from home. Either way, it’s all good.
The artist and his wife, fellow artist Julie Knight, have a cool walkup in the Chelsea neighborhood, right above a restaurant made famous in “Sex and the City.”
Skura gave new life to other people’s work. He and his wife also created their own work at Jakpot Studios in the Catskill Mountains of Woodstock, New York.
Life was good for the couple until the “Covid Spring” of 2020, when things turned strange.
A different view of life in the city
As Skura describes it, anarchy ruled his Chelsea neighborhood. Shops were closed and shuttered. The streets were dark and deserted. A dangerous scene. But the subway was worse.
“At one time, I was riding the subway and got punched in the face by this crazy guy,” he says. “He waited till the train pulled into the station, and then he punched me and ran out the door.”
Skura drew a self-portrait of his bruised face the next day. He didn’t stop drawing. He made it a daily routine and didn’t overthink it. He made more drawings in a few months than he had in decades. By the end of 2020, he’d filled up a series of sketchbooks and showed no signs of stopping. A silver lining to the pandemic?
“It pushed me to make more drawings, sure” he said. “But it wasn’t my literal subject matter.”
The artist adds that Covid was the catalyst for his new work, not the focus. He didn’t fill his sketchbooks with Bill Maudlin-style illustrations of sad people in KN95 masks. It was more like an emotional diary. Skura was capturing the weird, apocalyptic vibe of those strange days. He was also loosening up his technique.
The source of this new spontaneity?
Working like a graffiti artist
Skura credits Chelsea’s sudden outbreak of graffiti. It opened his eyes to new directions. He didn’t know the street artists’ names. But he liked their style. It changed what he drew and how he drew it.
“During lockdown, there was nobody around to stop the street artists,” Skura explains. “They went to town, and blanketed my neighborhood in graffiti. There was a future noir vibe to their images. It was very ‘Blade Runner.’ That run-and-gun approach was a big influence on my latest work.”
“Think fast, work fast” is the street artist’s creed. You don’t have time for right angles, so you go for rounded shapes. You can’t stand there with a palette and a paintbrush, so you arm yourself with markers and spray-paint. Skura did likewise.
“I emerged from my Covid experience with a different style of working,” he adds. “Before that time, my work had been a little tighter, a little more controlled. My new work became very intuitive. I used to think and think before starting a piece. Now I just let my hand go.”
Christina Baril, Art Center’s exhibition director, curated this show to highlight the in-the-moment results. It includes multimedia drawings from Skura’s sketchbooks, along with his paintings employing same improvised approach.
That free-flowing style is crystal clear in Skura’s “New Noir” (2021). The cyberpunk vibe is equally unmistakable. It’s essentially two paintings, one painted on top of the other. The base image is a tangle of organic and technological forms, wide-open eyes, and a spidery network resembling a circuit board. Skura painted over it with a second layer of thick, black, flowing lines, as if a graffiti artist with a can of Krylon spray-paint had tagged the original painting on the run.
A looser style
“Ghost Machine” (2023) takes a similar two-tier approach. But it flips the tonal values like a photo-negative. Here, the over-painted ribbon is white, not black. And the vibe is colder and more high-tech. “I was thinking of deep fakes, AI, and the concept of ‘the ghost in the machine,’” Skura says. “We imbue cybernetic intelligence with greater levels of cognition. ChatGPT and other apps ‘imitate’ human response. At what point is it more than imitation? And how would we know? As a sculptor, I’m influenced by the Shinto concept that everything has a spirit. A stone has a spirit … wood has a spirit … you try to bring that out. If you apply that to digital systems, what kind of spirit are we talking about?”
“Clowntown” (2023) is a puzzle box of swirling forms. Eyes peek through the open spaces. Floating eyes, against a field of pure white. (These peepers aren’t that different from a clown’s eyes surrounded by whiteface makeup.) The significance? “To me, Sarasota is “Clowntown” – and I mean that in a good way! I had some relatives in town who were in the circus. My family was involved with the Ringling Brothers and Sarasota’s circus history. I think cultural gatekeepers tend to brush it aside. The circus isn’t Chi-Chi; it doesn’t have that highbrow snob appeal. But you can’t just sweep it under the rug.”
Skura’s “social studies” in this exhibition have a three-dimensional quality. They’re not studies for sculpture, but they could be. “I’ve been creating sculpture in the same spirit,” he says. “It’s like an athlete training in the gym. If you do something over and over again, you don’t have to think about it, you can just do it. So, I’m applying the same muscle memory I learned in my drawings to my sculpture. I just let my hand go and do it.”
Arts Newsletter:Sign up to receive the latest news on the Sarasota area arts scene every Monday
Theater, music, dance, art and more:70+ arts events to experience in February in Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte counties
The eye is a consistent motif in these pieces. The significance?
“The eye is the first thing you draw as a child,” says Skura. “This work is a new beginning for me. I’m trying to think and draw with fresh eyes and that means drawing eyes!”
Speaking of new beginnings, Sarasota was the beginning of Skura’s path as an artist. It’s changed a lot since he left it in 1995. How does his homecoming feel?
“It feels pretty good,” he says. “Julie and I drove around the first day looking for the places we used to live and hang out. A lot of my 1990s haunts are gone, but many of my old friends are still here, and it was great seeing them against at the opening.”
‘Christopher Skura: Social Studies’
Continues through March 25, with three other exhibits, at Art Center Sarasota, 707 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. 941-365-2032; artsarasota.org