Blue Sky
Henry Geldzahler, the late curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, said about Blue Sky’s painting, “Fresh and bold… His work has both the technical ability and the freshness of vision, the feeling that something familiar is being seen for the first time, that has produced some of the best American painting of the past 10 years… makes me want to see more of the artist’s work.”
Blue Sky was born Warren Edward Johnson in the old Columbia Hospital at the corner of Harden Street and Hampton Street. His father was a city fireman, then a city fire inspector, and he later became the state fire marshall. Sky’s late older brother, Charles Ray Johnson, retired from the U.S. Air Force and had a second career with SLED.
When Sky was in the sixth grade, age 12, he worked at the Bertram & Crider Sinclair gas station on the corner of Millwood Avenue and Maple Street. Bertram and Crider were theology students at the Lutheran Seminary, and when they left for class, they left the station in Sky’s capable but young hands.
After six years at Schneider School, now the GranDevine condominium complex, and two at Hand Junior High, Blue’s talent in art was apparent to the faculty at Dreher High School. His Dreher art teacher, Miss Moselle Skinner, managed a professional gallery quality art collection for the duration of her career at the school. The art hung along all the halls in the building, all well beyond what Sky was capable of producing at the time and all a positive inspiration to Sky.
In the ninth grade and again in the tenth, Sky was recognized as one of the country’s best student poster artists for his submissions to the National Safety Council poster contests.
At age 15, Sky let the word get out he was the legal age to join the S.C. Air National Guard. He had been building model airplanes most of his childhood, and his paintings included military jets as subject matter. The Guard took him for a six- year stint in aircraft maintenance. Sky was especially proud of the Guard’s F- 104 fighter jets because South Carolina was the first state unit in the country to fly them.
As hair styles changed, Sky learned to stuff his locks under his Air National Guard hat.
While he was working on fighter jets, Sky was also maintaining his two convertibles, a ’49 Mercury and a ’50 Mercury, both with big engines.
Sky started his college education immediately after high school graduation, but with his art production and his Guard duties and his other sources of income, besides his social life, he hardly had time for his class schedule.
He worked at Webb Rawls Art Supply on Gervais Street until he was offered an artist’s position at book publisher and printer R. L. Bryan Co. on Sumter Street, facing the S.C. Capitol. Bryan’s had the latest in off- set print machines, and they needed artist Sky to help with paste- up and general design assignments.
While in college, Sky was producing more writing than he was cranking out canvases. He wrote for USC’s
literary magazine, The Crucible,
mostly poetry and short fiction.
With his degree in studio art, Sky left his job at Colite in Lexington County, moved to New York City, and landed a job as a technical illustrator with Cushing & Nevelle on lower Park Avenue. In his off hours he studied at the Art Students’ League near the southwest corner of Central Park .
After a year’s worth of commuting for more than an hour each way on the subway from Sheepshead Bay, Sky’s time was becoming too valuable for his daily straphanger rides, and he moved back to Columbia in the late 1960s.
In 1972, walking out the glass doors of the old Five Points Winn- Dixie, Sky looked up to the overcast clouds. An opening occurred in the clouds, the sun shone through, and Sky could see a patch of blue sky, finally, after days of dreary rain. That was it. He went to his friend attorney Bob Sandifer, and he had his legal name changed from Warren Edward Johnson to Blue Sky.
Just the year before, 1971, when he earned his master’s degree, Sky had declared himself a professional artist, dropped all moonlight work to support his art, and his one- man show at lower Gervais Street’s Betsy Havens Gallery that spring was a sellout.
Sky met his wife Lynn in 1981, and they married in 1991. They opened Charleston Gallery in Charleston, but the day after Hurricane Hugo hit, they decided to move the gallery to Five Points, later changing the name to Blue Sky Gallery. They have a son, Jesse Jet Sky, who is a computer game designer for Bioware in Austin, Texas.
Editor’s note: Sky’s work
can be seen at www.blueskyart.
com and at the Blue Sky
Gallery on Saluda Avenue in
Five Points.
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