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He was, however, as sensitive to the almost unavoidable competition
for supremacy existing between these two fundamental aspects of his art, as
he was aware of the serious aesthetic consequences resulting from selecting
either one as the primary criteria for his aesthetic decisions. During the
act of painting the conscious analysis should be subordinated, he said, so
his artistic instinct could be the ultimate arbiter between color and form.
But there were, of course, other considerations as well he realized;
including the possibilities of pursuing the motif through its gestalt, its essential form - by way
of, for example, simplification, and hence abstraction, as a departure from
realism - or of exploring further the Cezannian proto-cubist concern
regarding pictorial flatness and non-illusionistic space rendition.
Skov’s continued
confrontation of these aesthetic issues, which he had begun during the last
part of the Svaneke Period, both by way of discussing them with Isabella
and by painting his resulting vision, would have a profound effect on his
aesthetic development and all his future painting. Where he before had been
more compromising towards his instinctual desire for pictorial flatness as
a central aesthetic approach, he pursued in La Colle the two-dimensionality
of the compositions almost relentlessly.
His paintings of
landscapes and still-lifes from this period are not without a sense of
space, quite to the contrary; however, space is induced by the viewer’s
perception, practically without any outside clues except color, and
entirely without illusionistic perspective.
At the same time,
Skov also experimented with increasingly strong visual effects of the
spectral colors in balanced harmonies, as the paintings from this period
demonstrate so convincingly; however, in reality this was not so much a
departure from his previous work as a continuation of it, since he already
in Svaneke had obtained some spectacular results. But the extent to which
he pursued this goal was significant for his artistic expression, and as a
consequence, quite substantial visible changes resulted in the paintings:
Luminous fields of contrasting colors appeared, most often with gradually
changing color varying in intensity homogeneously from one side of the
field to the other, and without traces of his previous expressive brush
strokes.
Skov’s use of color
in La Colle took on an almost transparent,
crystalline character and the visual effect of spectrally pure hues,
as if he
had been painting with the rainbow directly on the canvas. But he
did not necessarily use only the primary colors in his compositions. The
color
harmonies are very tightly controlled and assertive, but never
aggressive,
and they invariably seem exceedingly well balanced and
sophisticated, yet without being particularly complex. In their
inventiveness, clarity and delightfulness they bring to mind, to use a
musical metaphor, the splendid,
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