Skunder in Context

3 x 62 5/8 in. (143.8 x 159.1 cm). Collection of The North Carolina Museum of Ai SKUNDER IN CONTEXT Solomon Deressa Skunder Boghossian is not only the quintessential Ethiopian painter to come along since Ethiopia's glorious 18th century Gonderine era, he is also the first heir to all of Ethiopia's art traditions. And at the international level of art, Skunder ranks among the major painters of the second half of the 20th century. Skunder Boghossian, Color Photograph, 1993, courtesy of Salah Hassan. "A shining point exists where all lines intersect" Czeslaw Milosz1 Skunder could have well become a musician, since he seems to need music as an associative environment for his work almost as much as he needs light to probe for the forms and colors that he Quarries out of the flat surfaces that are his primary hunting ground. He literally caresses the canvas, wood, metal, or parchment on which he is about to work as if the palpability of images has primacy over their appearance. "I like porous surfaces," he once said, "especially things that remain in sands, textures left by sneakers, tractors , a tank, things which witness their time."2 In his later works, the visual signification of Time and the tracker's need to peer into the opacity of matter are fundamental and lead to lucency. Stanislas Chojnacki writes: Skunder in his paintings has revealed to us the intensity of light in the matter he treats ... This luminosity, often centered in one spot of the painting, creates such a depth of radiance in his canvas that it is impossible to think in categories of traditional dimensions. The luminosity escapes any measure of reality and becomes a whirl of cosmic dust, a movement tout court... For the old masters, color determined the light; for Skunder's seemingly limitless virtuosity, darkness is also light itself.3 His multi-sensory talent notwithstanding, Skunder will likely remain a painter until the end. Here is the kind of cynosure that leaves no room for a life that weaves its way through one center of 5 A bearer of such gifts from that point at which "all lines intersect" involves a "certainty." The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift." 4 attention to the next, so it is no surprise that his career has been phenomenally productive. Between 1963 and 1995, aside from participating in several international touring shows such as UNESCO's Artists of the World Against Apartheid in 1983, he has exhibited almost seventy times. But the primary issue is not one of proliferation , but as Lewis Hyde asks, whether the work is "the gift we longed for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irreversibly moves us." If that is the case, in what context did Skunder's considerable gifts arise? Where and when did these gifts come to maturity? How did his innate talent, his training, and the circumstances of his life interact to facilitate his work? Skunder's career took off when he won a painting competition at the age of 17 at the 1955 National Exposition in Addis Ababa and was awarded an Imperial scholarship to study art at the Slade in London. He came to maturity as an artist during theyears known as the Addis Spring, roughly 1962 to 1973. The six years between 1966 and 1972 gave Skunder the opportunity to ground in his native soil everything he had learned during the previous elevenyears in Europe. He had the opportunity to travel to Time Cycle , 1982,48"x 48," embossed bark cloth and sand enamel. the wonder that is the rock-hewn monolithic churches of Lallibela, and to the imperial cities of Gonder and Axum, and to many monasteries. As he saw the funerary sculptures of southern Ethiopia and the grottoes of Harrar, his mind was blown open. In the streets of Addis, and elsewhere, humble magical scrolls, whose pristine purpose was to ward off evil, showed him that surrealism is not a one-time...