In their first ever joint exhibition, father and son artists Arthur Skinner and Joe Skinner present their separate and diverse bodies of work. Both educators at heart and with keen eyes for detail, Skinner and Skinner use traditional methods to create contemporary works of art that pay homage to the overlooked and the ephemeral.
Arthur Skinner holds a BA in Visual Arts from Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) and an MVA in Printmaking from Georgia State University. He has served as Professor of Visual Arts at Eckerd College since 1976. In the past five decades, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions across the US, including several at the Morean Arts Center. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum (NY), the Knoxville Museum of Art and Eckerd College.
About his work, Skinner states: “I started out as a printmaker, but for many years now I have focused my creative energy almost exclusively on drawing, and (secondarily) in working in the darkroom. A romantic at heart, my drawings are imaginary views that I conjure as I draw, sometimes depicting a ruin, or mounds of debris. Images evolve very slowly once the first marks are made on the paper – often a passage or road in a desolate setting, perhaps with ambiguous hints of direction in the form of visible yet indiscernible road signs. One may observe the recurring presence of elements such as loose bricks, cracked sidewalks, street lamps, power lines, barricades, and chain link fencing.”
Joe Skinner received his BA and served three years as a teaching assistant at Eckerd College. He recently earned his MFA from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi where he currently teaches. Skinner’s prints have been exhibited nationally and are included in the collections of the Bradbury Museum of Art and Eckerd College, and have been featured in several publications, including the Tampa Bay Times. “Printmaking is the foundation of my practice, while an inventive spirit serves to kindle its hearth with an experimental use of mixed media. I combine unconventional materials and methods of image-making to explore themes of faith, fate, chance, and probability.
“My most recent work examines the lottery through the narrative lens of Christianity, and portrays traditional iconographies through contemporary printmaking methodologies to create a dialogue between personal, spiritual, social, and commercialized contexts. I reclaim discarded lottery tickets, re-envision them as votive tokens assembled en masse, and then incorporate them into intricate collages. In layering these printed ephemera, they are reactivated as a metaphorical geologic record of a community seeking hope and escape from drudgery. This multi-disciplinary approach breathes new life into these discarded materials and invites a deeper consideration of the emotional, spiritual, and socio-economic challenges embedded in the lottery experience.”
