Peter Holbrook had a friend who lived in Mount Shasta, California. She had hundreds of pictures of the clouds that passed over the mountain. To her they looked like UFO saucer shaped spaceships. Back in 2014 Peter did a small painting from our back yard titled UFO’s in the Meadow. The painting shows a series of odd shaped clouds. Did Peter think these clouds were UFO’s? No, but sometimes he just needed to have a little fun with his painting titles.
Many times Peter would take photos of just the clouds. “The sky is where I take my liberties. I enjoy imagining a wide range of atmospheric conditions.” If a painting needed some drama or relief he could always insert some clouds.
Art history shows us that there are endless ways to interpret clouds in paintings. They appear in a stormy sky over land, a rough sea or reflected in a calm pond. They can add visual interest to a desert landscape or drama to a mountain top covered in snow. At the age of 73, Georgia O’Keeffe started a series of cloud paintings (1960-1977) from her observations of them while looking out an airplane window from an altitude of 3,000 feet. This, along with her airplane travels around the world, inspired her to do a series of 11 cloudscape paintings. One of the most recognized paintings from this series was titled Sky Above Clouds IV, which was painted in 1965. The painting is 8 feet high and twenty-four feet in length. In this painting the clouds are cylindrical. To me they look like floating bed pillows. The visible horizon and the blue sky between the cloud shapes gives the painting perspective. This painting is now in the permanent collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. See link below.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/100858/sky-above-clouds-iv
We will leave you with a Henry David Thoreau quote from 1859: “This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever…. Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds.”