The cloud is suspended against a distant pale blue backdrop like a slab of arctic ice. My eyes scan the horizon, taking in the massive shape over nearby rooftops. I experience it as an expansive whole, stretching wide across my field of vision. I have painted hundreds of these skies. With each new sky comes a new experience.
With tangible weight and limitless depth, the sky seems to be in an ongoing process of disorganization and reorganization. I want to capture it, express it on paper. I am looking for its unique form and structure, while I try to express spaciousness and atmosphere, if not emptiness.
Something shifts and I feel this sky as a million discrete details. There is no way I could ‘capture’ it on a piece of paper. It is all rhythm and sensation. I just try to stay open and to explore it
I usually make these paintings at sundown. The waning of the light of day intensifies my desire to capture the shifting, darkening sky.
I paint skyscapes by sequencing layers of paint of different consistencies, from the base up. Analogies to cooking make sense. If there is such a thing as a recipe, I need to be willing to throw it out at any stage. Skies don’t emerge on paper in clean step-by-step stages in these paintings. Stages overlap with continuous advances and retreats.
l spend some time watching. Not for anything, in particular. I’m waiting for the shifting sky to align in a way that I can respond to. An emotional response, pleasure, joy, even a conflicted, difficult feeling. It helps to turn off the internal noise that keeps me from focusing. It’s procrastination as a strategy. Something usually happens.
Painting skies is about improvisation. You start with a vision of how the sky could possibly appear.
But this sky won’t wait for me. The massive cloud has evolved into ribbons of receding clouds forms lit by the glancing light of a setting sun. My version of it begins on paper, through a process of exploratory gesture. I apply passages of paint, first over the whole surface and then into select sections. I need a predictable series of moves to begin the process of painting. I begin with a semi-opaque wash of pink over the whole sheet with broad lateral strokes. The warm pink glow will resonate through the colours that follow and cover it. Gestural horizontal strokes of paint of thin paint describe the trajectories of movement of my eyes across the clouds. It is a tenet of traditional Chinese brush painting that the first stroke of a painting is key and is felt in the final outcome. Initial touches might not be visible in my finished paintings but they are crucial.
I use an unorthodox variety of water-based mediums, from gouache and watercolour, to colours from the English specialty paint company Farrow & Ball sample pots. By tinkering with these various combinations, that I discover the most surprising colours and textures. The surface is a gritty, textured sandpaper, manufactured by Canson for pastel drawing, coated with blue-grey paint. I tape the paper down to a table so that they don’t fly away mid-brushstroke with a sudden, violent gust of wind.
I focus on a portion of the sky, a piece of cloud edge against a distant blue striped with thin cirrus clouds. All these pieces have to cohere. With a flick of the brush, I can describe their gestures, searching for the right handwriting, the ‘signature’ of this cloud. Critic John Rewald wrote of Monet that each brushstroke was a mirror of the individual and his mood. Monet’s brushstrokes could be vigourous, casual and brutal.
The sky has become something deeper, both more ominous and more gentle. A fading afterglow of the sunset tinges the underside of scattering clouds. The world around me darkens, but my eyes have adjusted. I paint the glimpse of a saturated orange at the horizon with a sliver of vermillion against blue-grey. Now, I’m a rush. Clouds and the light seem to shift faster and faster. I know from experience that this won’t last long. I have to get it down without showing too much effort.
Using a panoramic composition, I lay in horizontal strokes of paint to describe trajectories of movement across the surface and back into space.
Paint, paper, and elements all affect the tempo of painting. Temperature, humidity, and wind interact to vary the malleability of each successive layer of paint. I aim for control but not at the loss of spontaneity. John Singer Sargent depended on wet-in-wet painting effects in his Plein air watercolour paintings. He was trying to capture so much life, colour, atmosphere and detail that he opted for as much spontaneity as he could. He called these paintings his ‘emergencies.’
The process of painting in the forms and shapes of clouds into a still wet surface becomes more steady. Occasionally I paint without my glasses and a more unified, glowing but blurry sky looks back at me. Lustrous light emanates from the glistening paint. I strive for the presence of light.
I add a lower foreground element along the base of the painting, which pushes the sky back into space. I only do this after the shape and emotion of the sky is there. Each painting invokes paintings that went before and the implication of the ones that will follow. There are stops and starts. I make a concerted effort to finish because the paint surface has become too saturated with paint and information. You can only keep this up for a few minutes. Eventually, it just gets too dark. The sky has changed too much compared to the painting in front of me. I can’t see any more and I didn’t even notice it.
Painting skies is about finding a stable creative structure with an inherently unstable subject. One that encourages flow, flexibility, and self-awareness. I stay within a framework and loosen it up. I am guided by a process of seeing the sky and the painting in front of me guided by my sense of touch, the feel of the brush in my hand and sensation of the surface of the paper at my fingertips.