Audra Skuodas

(Kaunas, Lithuania, 1940 - 2019, Oberlin, Ohio)

American, born Lithuania

Born in Lithuania, Audra Skuodas spent six years of her childhood in a displaced persons camp in Germany during World War II. Her family arrived in the United States in 1949, and she was raised in Illinois, surrounded by her Lithuanian relatives. She studied art at Northern Illinois 
University, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. While there, she met her husband, John Pearson, a fellow artist and an Englishman from Yorkshire. The couple taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada before Pearson’s career brought them to 
Oberlin College, where he joined the art department faculty and taught for fifty years. They converted a former multi-floor furniture store just off the small town’s central square into a shared home and studio, where they happily enjoyed family life, work, study, and seclusion. This complete studio remains near to Akron in Oberlin, essentially untouched since the artist’s death in 2019, providing a foundation for rich understanding and appreciation of Skuodas’s art. She worked constantly, melding her homemaking and her care for two children (Cadence and Jason) with her art through daily practice. Sewing, puppetry, dance, and drawing were central to her own work as an artist, and they were also cherished shared activities with both of her 
children. Jason trained as an architect at Princeton, while Cadence studied dance at Vassar College and also followed Audra’s interest in spiritual study as a yoga practitioner.

Through her husband, Skuodas befriended many noted artists of her generation, counting Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, and David Hockney as friends who stayed at the home in Oberlin during their travels to the region. Alongside these connections, her personal interests focused most of all on the historical and comparative study of spiritualist art movements, as well as the craft and design of worldwide cultures. Skuodas’s pursuit of the universal, cosmic, late Surrealist ideas and images that run throughout her lifetime of work, as well as her integration of her art and personal life, and her use of a variety of purportedly “craft” materials in a fine art context, place her as an overlooked figure in the history of pioneering feminist artists working all over the globe.

Through her continuous and fervent work across thousands of paintings, drawings, artist’s books, embroideries, and other projects, Skuodas gradually developed her style and interests. These can be broken into a series of relatively distinct periods:In her early years in Oberlin during the late 1960s and 1970s, Skuodas pursued figuration in paintings, drawings, textile works, and other media. The archive includes approximately one hundred paintings from this period, in a late Surrealist style evoking Paul Delvaux and the late work of Rene Magritte, blending these influences with fashion magazine illustration and often featuring self-portraiture. Thanks to this last aspect, much of this early work may be interpreted as autobiographical. Describing this period, Skuodas wrote “Sensitive chaos, formulating itself into waves, patterns and natures intermeshing. Parallel phenomena: body, spirit.”

In the 1980s, Skuodas’s evolving approach came to feature even more strongly structured compositional backdrops and increasingly stylized figures with conspicuously long limbs. With a sense of a universal, embodied language, these sinewy subjects suggest the movement of 
dance, as well as indications of stretching against physical confinement. The artist later reflected on this period, noting that “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.”

Shortly before 1990, Skuodas began including Christian iconography in her work, drawing elongated Christ figures, making crucifix sculptures, and eventually melding the Christ forms into more attenuated human figures reminiscent of the Vienna Expressionist artists (Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, among others). Her broader spiritual searching included many 
other sources, but she drew from Christianity in particular as a compelling example of universal rather than specific religious archetypes. Her most common symbols of this kind represent the blood and wounding of Christ, pointing to human experiences that mix pain, reflection, and 
reverence.

Continuing to focus on universal archetypes, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Skuodas shifted in style again, further exaggerating the elongated features of her figures and combining them with increasing abstraction drawn from her enormous output of works on paper. With their unusual combinations of varied symbols and styles, paintings from this period fit with an idea that Skuodas called “vibrational vulnerability… The works arise from meditative contemplation of seemingly disparate phenomena that we have compartmentalized and yet function as tandem, parallel realizations of that ever-changing continuum we call Life.”

In the final period of her career, Skuodas’s long progression toward increasingly stylized and archetypical imagery reached total abstraction with works that are geometrically structured, yet soft and emotive through the artist’s varied compositions and sublime palette of pale pinks, blues, greens, and yellows. This form of abstraction was especially well suited for Skuodas’s aim “to reveal moments when invisible phenomena make themselves visible” and her method in which “Each painting, drawing, or book builds on my previous work.”

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