Sublime Capricci
Skinner + Skinner, recently on view at The Morean Arts Center in downtown St. Pete, was a father-son exhibition of hope. Arthur Skinner exhibited small, detailed pencil drawings of imagined landscapes and autobiographical silver-gelatin abstractions alongside Joe Skinner’s etchings of religious icons made from discardable lottery tickets.
The first thing you noticed is that the exhibition was presented as groupings of small black-and-white artworks made by Arthur, the father, interspersed with groupings of large colorful artworks made by Joe, the son. The next thing you noticed was that there’s a theme of Christianity prevalent in the imagery. Finally, you realized that both father and son have influenced each other over the years while each maintained distinct artistic styles.
Arthur is about to retire from a tenured teaching position in the Visual and Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Eckerd College—but it was called Florida Presbyterian College when he attended the institution in the late 1960s. He began teaching there in 1976 after earning an MVA in printmaking from Georgia State University, and, with his mixture of faith and artistic expression, has been an influential mentor for students there ever since. “I was raised Presbyterian,” says Arthur, “and my dear eldest brother, who was Professor of English at Presbyterian College in South Carolina, and also my first mentor, had heard good things about this new and innovative school in Florida, so he recommended that I look into it. I visited, liked what I saw and the palpable energy that I felt when visiting the art department, and off I went. I arrived as a first-year student in the Fall of 1968.”
Arthur has a signature style in both drawing and photography. His drawings are tightly rendered, imagined urban environments where claustrophobia creates a sense of unease. The skies are never clear, but are criss-crossed with chem trails from unpictured machines in the atmosphere. There are evenly dispersed stratus clouds that create veins in the sky like an El Greco. The tree limbs are never sparse, but are snarled and gnarly like a spooky thicket from a nightmare. They reach toward you, ensnare you, and visually suffocate you.
“Clouds illuminated by the sun, jet trails crossing in the sky, and halos play an important role as elements in the skies of my drawings. Occasionally a storm will approach in the distance,” Arthur says. “One of my earliest inspirations, even as far back as when I was a student at FPC, were the Carceri d’invenzione by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (c.1745-50). They seemed so remarkably proto-surreal. Then followed an awareness of Canaletto’s imaginary views of Venice. Mix that in with my love of the Romantic era, and scenes depicting ruined abbeys by artists such as Constable and Friedrichs. Put those inspirational ingredients into a setting of a suburb in decline.”
Another defining characteristic of Arthur’s drawings is that they are almost entirely monochromatic, consisting of deep grays and eraser whites, and rarely utilize color. “Most of my drawings are graphite, with an occasional hint of a very light blue color pencil within a cloud formation,” says Arthur. “The one exception in the Morean exhibition is The Moon & Venus, which is charcoal and color pencil; it’s also the most intense use of blue I’ve ever made. But my palette is limited: black, gray, white and blue. More recently I’ve been using graphite and ink together, but none of those drawings are featured in the Morean exhibition.”
Arthur’s photography, which is also almost entirely monochromatic, uses darkroom techniques and sandwiching negatives to depict oblique autobiographical allegories. Formally, Arthur’s photographs have a painterly aspect to them as well as a feeling of collage. They’re assemblages of materials brought together by someone searching for a lifetime of tokens and mementos.
Some of the photographs are so densely allegorical and so privately self-referential that the viewer wouldn’t—nay couldn’t—decipher them to the extent to which Arthur imbues them with meaning. Autoritratto Numerico, for example, has several layers of meaning. “The title translates as Numerical Self-Portrait,” says Arthur, “Associated with each number or set of numbers is a host of stories that constitute my life. The numbers are arranged in chronological order beginning with the birthdate of my father on December 1st, 1913 to the date of his death in October of 1994, and in between are all manner of numbers that have been central to my life—addresses, significant dates, locations, phone numbers, significant transitional years. In our extended family, for example, 1982 is how we refer to the place I grew up: 1982 Azalea Circle in Decatur, Georgia. But we all just say 1982.” The fact that none of this context is disclosed alongside Autoritratto Numerico adds a surreal quality to the piece. We’re left to fill in the gaps of interpretation.
Joe graduated from Eckerd College in 2014, and went on to earn his MFA from Texas A&M University in 2024, where he currently teaches. He creates angelic portraits from lottery tickets and cutting-edge printmaking techniques. His subjects appear as Saints with halos behind their contemporary visages of thick-rimmed glasses, baseball caps, and barbershop-trimmed beards. Each wears a collared utility shirt with a Stripes logo on it, implying they work at the convenience store chain common to the American Southwest, and some are seen holding scratch-offs that reflect the ground—the ‘canvas’—on which they’re depicted.
“The convenience store clerks are who we interact with on a daily basis, yet they’re nameless to us despite having a name tag. They’re the ones dishing out dreams,” Joe says. “I asked them if I put a trash can behind the register would they throw the customers’ discarded tickets into it—which is technically illegal—but they agreed. So, for three years I collected these lottery tickets. I started with seven stores, and after a few days I had to trim it down to two because I had bags and bags of them very quickly.”
Illustrated with thick, black, tattoo-style contours, an aspect accentuated by the use of woodcut and laser-engaraving techniques, the Saints give the impression of panels of stained glass. But instead of illumination, the God behind these prints is that of trashy commercialism and get-rich quick schemes. “I think about faith, chance, and probability. I also think about ephemera and the impermanence of life as well as the impermanence of what I create,” he says.
Joe’s pièce de résistance is a wall-sized collage interpreting Massaccio’s The Tribute Money. It’s a wall-sized, low-relief, wood etching covered in lottery tickets that Joe trimmed and arranged according to color in order to mimic the early-Renaissance fresco. The garish colors of the lottery tickets create the flowing pink and orange fabric worn by Jesus, Peter, and the tax collector, and its upper border consists of several collaged tickets that have the word ‘MONEY’ emblazoned in shiny green letters.
The piece operates in several contexts; as a blanketing of an important artwork from the Western Canon in the latest brands and commercial forces; as an illustration of Matthew 17:24-27 using contemporary materials associated with people who most need gambling profits; as an allegory for society’s reversion to pre-modern tendencies; as an icon of one’s own faith depicted in one’s own personal style.
“There’s a common biblical theme in my art,” Joe says, “stemming from my upbringing as a Presbyterian, but also from my study of theology and religions across the world. I include Christianity in my work because it’s my experience. I’ve lived it.”
Skinner + Skinner shows how two generations of artists approach contemporary capricci. For Arthur, the utopic dream includes the ruins of culture for the purpose of accentuating its beauty. Joe’s imagined reality equates poverty with wealth and good fortune with karma. Both maintain—sometimes just barely—an underlying sense of hope and justice in our shared experience of life; the father’s, a Romantic’s earnest approach; the son’s, one of an ironic Popist.