Sky and Clouds

Nope, I couldn’t come up with a better name. Painting inspiration comes from much different places than photography. This particular inspiration came from a photograph taken by a friend of mine. When I first saw it on Instagram, I instantly fell in love with the cloud structures. Clouds have been a somewhat nemesis of mine when it comes to painting so I figured this would be a great exercise. For me clouds are already impressionistic by nature, so when you try to paint them as they look, they always come out with too much structure. The other problem with clouds is if you try to “fix” any part of them on the canvas. This inevitably leads to the a fore mentioned problem, and then the whole thing spirals out of control and you begin again by repainting your background sky. This is my most successful “Sky and Clouds” to date. I think it worked for me because I viewed it as an exercise instead of a final piece. I left the mistakes alone and painted with quick deliberate strokes. It wont go into the Smithsonian, but at least I learned that there are no rules for architecture in cloud castles.