• Artist: Sky Glabush
• 'Sky Glabush: The letters of this alphabet were trees', Steven Friedman Gallery, New York (2024)
• Exhibition photography courtesy of: Olympia Shannon

Full Artist Interview Transcript: 

Sky Glabush interviewed by Dr. Philip Gurrey

PG - So we're here today with Sky Glabush in his studio in anticipation of his next show, which is at the Steven Friedman Gallery in New York. Could you talk to us about the importance of how you start a painting in the first place?

SG - Yeah. I think the question about the relationship between, making a painting, working on a large painting and having some kind of place to start...some preparatory beginning is huge. In fact, to me, it's in a way, kind of the most important thing. Which is like you have an experience or you encounter something...or a lot of times I'll see something in art, I'll see something in a painting that I really love.

And then, if I'm really spending a lot of time with that artist, like, say, for example, I've seen certain things in a painting that really kind of grabs me, and they seem like painterly problems. And then all of a sudden in nature, you realize that thing that he was grappling with in his painting, I'm seeing it also in the way I perceive a vista or trees or water or something like that. If I'm really enamoured with an artist and I'm spending time with them, sometimes I'll notice something out in the world that reflects some of those concerns. So sometimes I'll start with that artist, and I'll just make a copy of that painting that I was interested in. As a way of delving deeper into that work and not worrying about whether it's an original idea or my idea, just like a student would do, copying a great artist.

But sometimes those little copies kind of get blurred or corrupted somehow. And it's actually in that sort of contaminated arena that the germ of a new idea starts to emerge. Actually, when I start working on a larger painting, there's so much energy and time and effort put into like a seven by nine foot painting. It's a very different process. But if you take it back to that original idea, all of those concerns are encapsulated in the small little watercolour. So there is this really interesting, corollary or relationship between the, the big the big paintings and the studies. It's an important aspect of my work, for sure.

PG - You talk there about an encounter or an experience in landscape, and then you referred to this relationship that we have with, art historical precedents, painters from the past. Would you go as far as to say it's a form of translation? 

SG - So the idea of translation to me in a linguistic sense is like you've got an idea and it's being sort of transformed into some method of communication and that translation is quite conscious. But I think it only becomes painting when it's not conscious.

When you're really in the thick of it, you're not thinking about, how to translate something. To me, the language in painting is like a universe, like it's it's a cosmology. It's a place. It's not like there's nature and people...and then painting. It's like painting has a kind of a reality in the same way that nature or people have a reality. When I'm really looking closely at an artist, I'm actually just learning what the language of painting is.

That idea of translation for me is being aware that it is a language, being familiar, getting more and more familiar with this language and then trying to also step away and just let whatever it is that is happening, just sort of find a way to kind of let it let it appear. And sometimes it takes you to a place that you don't even want to go.

PG - Could you talk to us about that moment when you have this preparatory study that you feel might go somewhere and you have this larger work? What's that first interaction like?

SG - That's a tough question. I think most of the small works I do are never destined to go any further than that. They're often quite experimental, kind of playful. I take a lot of chances with the little ones that I can't really do so easily with the larger paintings. So the way I tend to work... it changes a lot. But in general, I'll start a lot at once. I'll try to start as many paintings as I can. If I'm building up to something. So sometimes I might have as many as 20 or 30 little paintings on the go. Then I'll come into the studio and I'll look at what I've got in front of me and then if one grabs my attention, I'll pull it out of the stack and I'll work on it for a while until I feel like I have an idea of where it's going. And then I stop and I try not to finish it. I try to just let it point in a direction and then stop. And then I'll try to do that with as many as I can, because that initial stage of not knowing is actually quite exhilarating. It's can be terrifying and difficult, but it's also quite fun because the stakes are low. But then there's a moment where I say, 'Oh, okay, I could do something with this'.

That initial playful stage can take sometimes several months of  picking it up, putting it down... And then at some point, I get a sense of what the painting could be as a painting. I'm not thinking about it in a preparatory way. I'm just thinking, how do I make this work?

And by work, what I mean by that, it's this is something I don't think I've ever spoken about... but it's maybe the most important thing for me, which is you put the painting up on the wall and you look at it, and does it work or does it not work? And that's the whole game. So when you put it up on the wall, you can tell if it's not alive or if it looks weak or if it looks fake...

There was a painting that I made from Klimt...and I made a very, very hackneyed, kind of awkward interpretation of a very famous painting of Klimt called Pine Forest II, and it's one of his great landscape paintings. And I knew that it was not just indebted to Klimt, I was just looking at it. But then my watercolour that I did of the Klimt painting was totally different. And so the Klimt was a great place to start. But then my little watercolour opened up a whole host of different things. So I took that watercolour...that's the image that we were using for the invitation for the show. And I blew it up to nine feet. And then in doing that, all of the cool and interesting things were gone. And it was terrible. It was like all the little nuances that happen with paper and watercolour, and I couldn't translate them. It was terrible. So then I had to do the same thing with that large painting as I had with my relationship to Klimt. I had to break it apart and try to find something new. So that process is a kind of interpretation of that. And then the interpretation itself has to become its own thing, independent of artist, independent of nature, independent of your other work. It has to find some kind of purchase on it. It has to become its own reality, so that kind of relationship between smaller works and larger works and the world around us. That's the triad. That's all of it really.

The work that I showed, called the Arrangement of Stars in London was really quite rooted in those little studies and then blowing them up and seeing what can happen. So starting with a little idea and then kind of scaling it up and trying to make those paintings say something more.  

This show was a different criteria. What I did was I started with a sketch or whatever, watercolour. But then I tried to return it to nature. This time I tried to have the resolution enter when it felt like I was back in that forest.

PG - I wonder if you might talk a little bit about whether you think the artists relationship to the work has subconscious psychological elements to it?

SG - Everything in a painting is a response or a reflection of your psychology and your identity. Everything. Nothing is outside of that. But I don't look for symbolism. I don't look for meaning in that way. I don't want to think about the meaning of a work in terms of symbolism or in terms of an underlying message.

If that starts to emerge, I try to get rid of it, because I think that like nature, if I don't see there being a message in it, I feel like everything is very fleeting and ephemeral and like a veil. You can see everything around us is always sort of humming with something else...something beneath it, something inside of it. And I want my work to be both. I want it to have energy and to have life and to have the body...but I want that to be in a kind of a state of detachment and a state of dare I say, humility.

I'm still just struggling with trying to simplify it and  to create a dialog - as we said before - between the natural world and my own spirit. As a kind of corollary, if we're talking any kind of symbolism between this world and the next world.