About Audra Skuodas

Audra Skuodas was born in Lithuania in 1940 and lived for six years in a displaced persons camp in Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1949. She became an American citizen in 1961, earned a B.A. and M.A. at Northern Illinois University, and married fellow artist John Pearson in 1965. They moved to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1972, where they maintained studios and a salon that hosted a global roster of artist friends and collaborators, including Robert Mangold, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, and others. Skuodas exhibited nationally and internationally, has been reviewed in The Art Newspaper and Art in America, and received the 2010 Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award In the Arts. She passed away in 2019.

During a career spanning five decades, Skuodas was focused and prolific, producing thousands of paintings, drawings and artist’s books which are at the same time personal and universal, exploring the boundaries between internal and external realities. Donald Kuspit has written of her work, “Whatever suffering the figure may signify, it does so largely through the tense way it interacts with the rest of the picture , which is essentially geometrical.” Skuodas is a true humanist, concerned with the role of humanity in the universe: its evolution/devolution and sensitization/desensitization. This often uncomfortable interaction is a significant point of reference in all of her work, and especially in the books. The books evoke the Zen Buddhist idea of satori: a symbiosis of image and text; the special moment of awareness in which the infinite and the finite become one.

Her legacy is stewarded by the Audra Skuodas Trust.

I seek to reveal moments when invisible phenomena make themselves visible. Each painting, drawing, or book builds on my previous work, addressing questions of sensitization or de-sensitization in visual form.

Starting in the 2010's, the drawings, paintings and books have been an exploration of what I call vibrational vulnerability: the invisible phenomena of incremental cause and effect. The works arise from meditative contemplation of seemingly disparate phenomena, which we have compartmentalized, and yet which function as tandem, parallel realizations of that ever-changing continuum we call Life: a cosmic dance of consequence. I seek to evoke and convey the ways in which our psyches are linked to the laws which manifest themselves in the formation of a flower, a snowflake or a seashell. The work strives to access this archetypal intellect.

Although much of the work has come to reside in the abstract, occasionally the ghost of a female figure recurs, as symbol and metaphor, for me, representative of the violation of universal soul or the brutalization of Mother Earth. Even in my earlier work, which was more figuratively representative, the figures were encased within geometric constructs; not as purely mathematical or decorative effect but as embracingly and evocatively symbolic.

My thinking has for many years been informed by what I refer to as the law of limits: that invisible phenomenon of tension and attraction which maintains the cosmic order. Harmony/Disharmony. Sensitization/Desensitization. Excess/Sustainability. Although these philosophical considerations play in the back of the mind, the work is arrived at through purely intuitive release, just as a ballet dancer soars beyond the discipline of training.

Maeterlink wrote, “Out of the silence of the soul is born the Wisdom.” My working process attempts to arrive at this distillation of energies: reverberations, responses, echoes–the vibrational criteria of effects. How is energy transmitted? Sensitive chaos, formulating itself into waves, patterns and natures intermeshing. Parallel phenomena: body, spirit. This is the space of my work.

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