Sometimes it can take a while before the Zeitgeist catches up with the thinking, sensibilities, and achievements of certain artists who, despite challenges, setbacks, and the changing currents of the always fickle art establishment, somehow manage to stay true to their own ways of observing the world as they develop their art-making techniques and express their distinctive personal visions.
When they’re not overlooked—or perhaps more dispiritingly, ignored—they may still find it hard to attract attention to their efforts due to a multitude of factors, including an inability to or a lack of enthusiasm for playing the art world’s prescribed self-promotion game.
Like their creator, the diverse series of works that made up the wider, multifaceted oeuvre of the Lithuanian-born, American artist Audra Skuodas (1940-2019) wore no easy art-market labels.
In this way, along with the fact that, for many decades, Skuodas lived and worked in the college town of Oberlin, Ohio, far enough away from such art-market centers as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles to find it challenging to penetrate them from a distance, she became an artist who was able to pour her energy, with a strong sense of focus, into her work—and immerse herself in the creative process, with gusto and an abiding sense of wonder at its cathartic power, which is just what she did.