Great sky paintings lift us with a sense of the vastness and space that daily moves above our heads. A strong sky in a landscape painting, oil, watercolor, or acrylic, expresses airy light, motion, and not least of all mood. A great sky stops the viewer and draws them deeply in.
We all get those moments: we look up and think damn the sky is beautiful. It sounds so simple, so common, but every time it’s a tiny shimmer of transcendence reminding us that we’re alive and to stay awake for it
It’s just as Walt Whitman says, “I don’t know what or how … but every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before.”
The rest of the words (in italics) in this post are “from” Walt Whitman, but they are not direct quotes from Leaves of Grass. They’re quasi-stanzas, excerpts and snippets stitched together and rearranged thematically over at www.thewordsofwaltwhitman.com .
Kim Casebeer, Kansas Clouds, oil, 9×12 in.
From The Daytime Sky
The sky overarches here,
I feel the vast space of the sky overhead so clear,
The free space of the sky, a wonderfully fine dome, transparent and blue,
The limpid spread of air cerulean,
Pellucid blue and silver tempering and arching all the immense materiality,
A vast, voiceless, formless simulacrum—
Yet maybe the most real reality and formulator of everything—who knows?
Shuang Li, “Summer Clouds,” oil, 8×8 in.
The days are full of sunbeams and oxygen,
The slight settling haze of aerial moisture,
The daylight is lit with more volatile light,
I am jealous and overwhelm’d with friendliness,
A contact of something unseen—an amour of the light and air.
I will go gallivant with the light and the air myself,
Lie on my back and breathe and live in that sweet air and clear sunlight,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong,
Not asking the sky to come down to my goodwill,
Scattering it freely forever.
Dan Marshall, “The Big Sweep,” watercolor
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, and with wondrous clouds,
I see, just see skyward, the stretching light-hung roof of cloud.
See those now, the passing clouds, silver and luminous-tawny,
How they go and go, tireless and without number,
Distant sky-clouds’ blended shapes, rolling silver-fringed clouds,
The clear cerulean and the silvery fringes,
With silver swirls like locks of toss’d hair, spreading, expanding,
Great fleeces of spacious white clouds, little or larger white ones, limpid, spiritual,
Swimming so silently, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave.
Wonderful how the sailing clouds aloft pass silently overhead,
It has always been one of my finer joys to watch the varied, varying, ever-changing, interlocking cloud-shapes,
The tumbling gorgeousness of the great cloud-masses—
Gorgeous clouds, drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me,
Fitted to the sky, to float with floating clouds.
Christine Lashley, “Charleston Top View,” oil, 30 x 30 in.
Thin swift passing clouds, like lace, blown overhead during a storm.
The clouds dispel’d, swiftly drew off like curtains, the clear appear’d, nature smiled again in her invigorated beauty. The sun shone out as it was dipping in the west, and with it the fairest, grandest, most wondrous rainbow I ever saw— all complete, very vivid at its earth-ends, spreading vast effusions of illuminated haze, violet, yellow, drab-green, in all directions overhead, through which the sun beam’d—an indescribable utterance of color and light, so gorgeous yet so soft, gladdening the sun and sky.
Kathleen Hudson, Light Breaking Through, Oil, 24 x 48 in.
Paint a better day sky! All of the artists (plus eight or nine more – 14 in all!) whose beautiful skies features in today’s post demonstrate their techniques in the video, “Clouds & Sky in Watercolor and Oil.”
