Flying North for the Summer - A Study of Clouds (revised, completed: June 12)

 

Flying North for the Summer - cellphone photo (filtered), Albuquerque - 2025, DS.

"At this point you are possibly saying, what on earth are you doing gazing at paintings of clouds in the sky when the earth is actually on fire? It’s an excellent question. But there is a difference between looking at the details of the universe that others insist are important– often at great profit to themselves – and looking at the details that move you on their own. They can be the same details. The important question is, which ones do you actually feel?"

"We spend so much time staring into our laps these days, looking desperately down into our smartphones and hungrily inhaling whatever the Internet has to offer. We live there now, down that dank, semi-real, untouchable and ultimately unknowable hole. But every once in a while, we forget it’s there, and look up."

- Two quotes from Canadian journalist Ian Brown's excellent, perennially relevant 2022 article: Paintings of clouds are just what the world needs right now. In the article, Brown features the Canadian landscape painters, The Group of Seven. Inset right is A Celebration (1924) by Georgia O'Keefe.

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Link Update! Also see:

A Meditation on the Endless Appeal of Clouds in Art

Clouds in Art

Artistic depictions of Clouds (via Medium)

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(Instead of taking photographs, these days I'm shooting short videos of clouds and exporting frames. This seemed like the best approach after a weird experience I had with a cumulonimbus cloud I wish I'd filmed... discussed recently on Mac's memorial in The Giant Awakens. Here lies the other half of that story...)

For an artist, working with clouds can be an illuminating experience. Working with an anomalous cloud, however - even if only documenting what you see with a digital camera - borders on the mystical realm. Something unexpected happens.

The first thing this artist discovered is that the lens was not recording the image exactly as I saw it. And I mean this beyond simplistic rationalizations such as faults with either a.) camera, b.) photographer. No, the clouds in the photographs rarely matched the clouds I saw from my perch on the balcony. It took me some time before I realized why.

(Continued below the jump...)

While the camera failed miserably in the color department and the exposure was often off the mark, technically, the camera was more accurate than my eyes because I was, more or less, envisioning the clouds from an emotional perspective. That is, what I hoped to capture reverberating with what I remembered and some nebulous concept of what I intended to create.

An interesting surprise, Albuquerque (between storms) - cellphone photo (filtered) - 2025, DS.

Which is why my previous assumption - that landscape artists are unnecessary here in NM - was a stupid statement. An artist creates and a human experiences from a level outside of time. The camera can only capture increments of time. In other words, it can't fulfill the holistic obligations of true expression without the intrusion of an organic mind; a mind which can meld and refine.

And, yet, every now and then, my cellphone still has the capacity to inform my vision and pleasantly surprise me. Hopefully, the shots in this post explain why.

I vaguely saw what appeared to be a goose in flight.The camera, however, revealed a dragon... and the moments of its eventual demise. My "organic" mind can't improve upon that!

There be a dragon! - cellphone photo - 2025, DS.

Incidentally, I've utilized a filter - an element of the camera's image-editing app - basically to add clarity.

The dragon's decapitation, Albuquerque -  cellphone photo - 2025, DS.

In any case, three years later, the question posed by Ian Brown still remains and is, perhaps, more urgently asked: are "paintings of clouds what the world needs now"?

Well, if the word "paintings" can refer to images in general, my answer would be, in part: YES!

Cloud painting by Ksenya Verse.

For more magical cloud paintings by 21st century, Russian-born American artist, Ksenya Verse, see my source article. For more clouds in art, see this page.