Sky Paintings

Still in the market for sky paintings. Dan bought be me a beautiful piece for my birthday, but I think it needs friends. Someday, I would love a whole wall (mounted salon style) of sky paintings.

Here are a few I've been dreaming about making part of the collection (though, if you beat me to it, my loss. . . ):



Toward the Cape, by Erin Spencer (check her work on etsy. Beautiful and affordable.)



J. Shears paints custom abstract sky paintings for customers. I love this one. . . the brush of french vanilla in the cloud tops? Gorgeous. Check her etsy shop for the variations she creates.



Mr. Stooshinoff's Cloud Shadow. His shop on etsy is called Paintbox and each jewel of a painting is more lovely than the next. . .

A room filled with sky? As long as I live in a bungalow, I'm not going to have some spectacular kitchen that flows into a ridiculously open and inviting back terrace. So, walls full of sky will have to do in their stead.

Getting Out of the House II

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I decided I needed fixins for Curry Laksa. But there's no purveyor of lemon grass or fried tofu puffs on the westside, so in to town we went. And it wouldn't have been fair to go that close to the dog beach and not take the schnoodle with us for a little fun by the lake.

But it was just as cold as this picture makes it look. A wind so biting and mean, that even with silk long underwear (tops and bottoms) and several layers over that, the cold just sliced right through. We lasted a scant 30 minutes.

It was a beautiful day, despite the cold. The sky looked like a sky from a Georgia O-Keefe painting. It doesn't show up perfectly in these photos, but it was really striking.

The sun came out for just a sec and lit up an old apartment highrise upshore. Proof that everything is beautiful in the right light.

All in all, we were pretty lucky that no lemongrass could be found near our house. We would have missed all of this loveliness.

January 28, 2010

There was bona fide sun yesterday--today, too. But yesterday the sun was doing lovely things to the sky out over the lake. I took pictures so that I could prove it. . . or so, if we descended back into another month of cloudiness, these pictures could tide us over here in Chicago.

Cloud Appreciation?

Okay. So, I've been digging on clouds lately (though not the last two days filled with rain and that flat grey wall of a sky that comes when a storm really settles in to stay a while), and much to my surprise today, I found out that I am not alone.

Check out the Cloud Appreciation Society. They have a Manifesto devoted to the importance of taking the cloud's beauty, mystery and importance seriously. They offer images of the "Cloud of the Month." They sponsor "cloud chats" and report on breaking "cloud news." And they provide a forum for Society members' cloud art and poetry.

I totally joined.

(but they're a little lame about linking to their site. . . they obviously love the clouds, but don't fully get the webernets.)

Cloud Inspiration

the original inspiration. last friday. clouds doing their thing west of Chicago around 5:30 PM.

JShear's Modern Abstract Cloud Paintings on Etsy.



Ambera Wellman's cloud paintings are amazing. Each one is more beautiful than the next. If I had unlimited resources, I would buy a huge house and fill it with her paintings. . . and would take many trips to Halifax to buy her work personally. I both love her work and am horribly jealous of it.

Clouds

It's been stormy here in Chicago, which means knock out skies, beautiful clouds. I'm always watching the sky trying to figure out what makes clouds clouds, visually speaking. . . how the light plays on them, how they fit together so complicatedly. This last weekend, driving around, every time D and I saw the city, there was a bank of low clouds behind the skyline. Something about their positioning, that we couldn't see their bottoms, they created the illusion that Chicago was located on top of a mountain, high above the clouds. How do clouds do that? It's amazing.

I'm imagining a whole bunch of small punch-needle skyscapes showing up in the near future.