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experience from the restoration of Christiansborg in Copenhagen twenty years earlier. The local clergy were
apprehensive until Skov, after ten weeks of intermittent cleaning and
repair work, finally could reveal the beautifully restored painting,
vibrant in its original Raphaelsque blue and red colors.
After the long interruption caused by the
voyage, relocations and acclimatization to Madeira, Skov again turned
directly to nature in order to re-energize his mind, making pencil and
charcoal drawings of the local landscapes and seascapes. These drawings,
made on location in front of each motif, show the views from the veranda of
the house, or up the street, or within a half hour’s walk along the rocky
beach. He executed them in what appears to be a quite straight forward
representational style, reminiscent of his charcoal drawings of landscapes
from France and Denmark ten years earlier. The landscapes come alive
readily and convincingly for the viewer,
and, as was characteristic also of his earlier work, the
compositions are well balanced, the drawing done with a firm hand showing
his sculptured approach to the components of the landscape. He made about a
dozen of these charcoal drawings in late 1946 showing, for example, the
beach below the home with part of the coastline west of Santa Cruz and the three small Desertas islands on the
horizon, or a shady avenue with parallel rows of large palm trees and the
interplay of their shadows in the bright tropical sunlight.
These drawings
appear quite uncomplicated in their concept, but they accurately reflect
Skov’s concern for maintaining pictorial unity between content and
expression; quite similar in fact to the sense of unity he demanded of his
paintings. His sensitivity to and instinctual need for pictorial unity at
all levels of visual perception, may very well supply one of the basic keys
to understanding the internal consistency that is also evidenced in his
work in general, notwithstanding the obvious differences in expression that
the various periods of his work seems at first to represent.
As Skov again
returned to work with oil painting in late 1946, he had no intention of
reverting back to his previous aesthetic expressions. He wanted to explore
new ground; yet, he felt quite confident about how he had already conquered
the elements of color and composition, while also being aware that he
eventually would have to come to terms with his concern about the
integration of visual and conceptual representation of three dimensional
space. His work during the Bakkeboelle period had made him realize, if
sometimes only by a latent feeling of uneasiness regarding some of his
pictorial solutions, that there was much to be questioned and understood in
this area. He needed to explore other visual perceptions, particularly with
respect to finding a more rigorous aesthetic reconciliation between
three-dimensional space/object representation and the flat canvas.
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