Post a Comment. Click on photos to enlarge. Monday, September 15, Painting Clouds. The Cloud, , Arthur Hacker Women with Umbrella, , Claude Monet Ever since I was a kid I've always enjoyed looking up at big, fluffy, cumulus clouds trying to imagine various human or animal shapes, watching them morph into other shapes, or simply drift by to be replaced by new shapes like an endless Disney parade.
Most people have probably done that at one time or another. Never however, even in my wildest imaginative binge, did I ever imagine anything as fantasmagorical or erotic as Arthur Hacker's The Cloud above.
In any case, such daydreams were about the only time I've ever "studied" clouds. Only when faced with the prospect of a painting having a large, uninteresting sky a few years ago, had I ever thought much about painting clouds. It's only then that I realize too, how few clouds I've ever painted and the fact that I really don't know how to paint clouds, at least not in the sense of John Constable below , Jacob van Ruisdael, or Claude Monet right.
Oh, I can paint a reasonably authentic, atmospheric blue sky and then streak and daub in some titanium white, swirl it a bit, and call what I get clouds, but that's little more than "decorating" the sky. In one case, frustrated by my meager efforts, I hit the Internet looking for clouds. Needless to say, it's pretty cloudy on the Internet. But what I found was either way too much, or simply as boring as what I could do just by playing around with the paint.
Photographers like to shoot the unusual , yet if an artist paints the unusual, the sky will simply take over the entire landscape, stealing the show from whatever lies below. Moreover, unbelievably beautiful cloud photos translate to the simply unbelievable when painted. I seldom paint landscapes for their own sake so when I want clouds in order to add a little interest to the sky, I have to be careful they don't become too interesting.
