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The crayon drawing
"Tomato Worms" from 1974, made in Middletown, New Jersey is one such example illustrating his fascination with nature's
designs, a curiosity and enjoyment that he had retained from his early
youth. It shows, scaled-up several times natural size, a half dozen large,
green tomato-worms, the oversized larva stage of a common yellow butterfly,
foraging on the leaves of a tomato plant. This drawing is deceptive in its
simplicity which is a result of many smaller sketches with close-up studies
of the minute details of the motif; and it again demonstrates his sure
sense for pictorial clarification through simplification.
Entirely different
in style, is the completely spontaneous small pencil sketch of "Agave
Plant" made in Houston, Texas in 1979, obviously a study made on impulse of a
visually engaging new motif with somewhat unusual, but very characteristic,
linear nuances which he evidently enjoyed investigating.
More characteristic
of Skov's late work, in so far as the approach and compositions are
concerned, are the large still-life, "Apollo Musagete", from 1974
and the several smaller paintings he made for his daughter-in-law with the
idea of having them converted to embroideries. These late Neo-cubist
compositions are completely consistent with his work from the late
nineteen-fifties and early sixties. More than just representing a
consolidation of his work, they provide his personal confirmation, with the
added benefit of many years of hindsight, of his mature perception of the
Cubist pictorial visualization.
There is plenty of
evidence that Skov, during these later years, looked at his artistic
activities principally as recreation, and simply enjoyed himself when he
was painting and drawing. An example of his work that illustrate this, but
interesting also because it shows a complete departure from his usual
pattern of work, is his modification and scale-up, undertaken during a
visit to California in 1988, of two smaller charcoal drawings. One
of the original drawings was made during his stay in Madeira forty-two years earlier, and the other was from
1929 made in the small mountain village, Haute-de-Cagnes in the South of
France, when he was just twenty-two.
While visiting in Mission Viejo in 1988, he saw both drawings in his son's living
room and used them for inspiration, transferring first one and then the
other of the motifs to two almost square pieces of varnished plywood. He
used a combination of charcoal and varnish to replicate the original
impressions, scaling-up from the original 32 x 48 cm drawing to the final
86 x 100 cm. The resulting change in aspect ratio from the original 0.64 to
the almost quadratic 0.86 of the larger format, obviously presented a major
challenge of having to reformulate the compositions without cropping the
pictures or distorting their visual balance.
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