In Audra Skuodas’s 2000 painting Grasping Infinity, a single hand, slender and bony, hovers in a white oval against a crimson expanse. The focal point is a small dark dot that floats between thumb and forefinger—infinity handled as an atom-like entity or a black hole.
Skuodas, a prolific artist who spent most of her life in Oberlin, Ohio, was drawn to the mysteries of the universe beyond the visible. In drawings and paintings that use sensuous colours, from deep reds and yellows to dusty pastels, she envisioned micro- and macrocosms of unseen phenomena that wove together spirituality and science. While at times figurative—hands are a recurring motif—her works often veer toward abstraction, arranging dots, ovals, spirals and linear patterns into gently hypnotic compositions. They share a desire to understand the oneness of the cosmos and how energies within and beyond one’s self are intertwined.
“Her work was a constant quest for a deeper truth,” Cadence Pearson Lane, Skuodas’s daughter, says. “What is this thing beneath everything else, what is the orchestration of the spheres, the harmony in the universe? Her work has been an evolution, and each subsequent period got her closer and closer to that truth.”
