Sky Dash

Ian Scott’s Sky Dash is a summer afternoon fantasy. An athletic young woman leaps into the air over a dizzying terrain. The landscape has morphed into a series of kōwhaiwhai curves and sharply fractured angles, punctuated by strangely upright little kauri trees. The smoothly contoured figures, the hills and the clouds are swept up into the looping rhythms of Scott’s composition. The colours are lurid, acid-bright.

To contemporary eyes, this startlingly artificial scene evokes a computer game. However, this painting was made at the end of the 1960s and it channels the rainbow palette and mini skirts of ‘swinging ’60s’ youth culture.

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