-
- (This article concerns painting and other non-photographic media. Otherwise, see cloudscape photography.)
Extensive Definition
In art, a
cloudscape (or skyscape) is the depiction of a view of clouds or the sky. Usually, as in the examples
seen here, the clouds are depicted as viewed from the earth, often
including just enough of a landscape
to suggest scale, orientation, weather conditions, and distance
(through the application of the technique of aerial
perspective, which see).
A highly complex cloudscape—as in some works of
J. M. W.
Turner, for example—within an otherwise conventional landscape
painting, can sometimes seem like an abstract
painting-within-a-painting, nearly obliterating the realistic
setting with a grand display of gestural force. Some critics have
explicitly cited 19th century cloudscapes and seascapes as precursors of the
work of abstract
expressionist artists such as Helen
Frankenthaler.
Thus, commenting on a 1999 Turner
exhibition, New York
Times art critic Roberta Smith writes that, in 1966, "the Museum
of Modern Art established the artist's lush late works ... as
precursors of both Impressionism
and modernist abstraction.
The current show is a feast of Frankenthaleresque
plumes of color...."http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E0DD103DF933A05757C0A96F958260&sec=&pagewanted=2.
Smith further observes that such works "conflate extremes of sea
and sky with extremes of painting, showing both to contain elements
of the unfathomable and the unknown."http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E0DD103DF933A05757C0A96F958260&sec=&pagewanted=2
There are some later cloudscape paintings - for example, the
famous cloudscapes of Georgia
O'Keeffe - in which the clouds are seen from above, as though
viewed from an airplane.
According to an essay at the website of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Among the most dramatic and
well-known images of O'Keeffe's later years are her cloudscapes of
the 1960s and '70s. Traveling around the world, she was exhilarated
by the views seen from an airplane window." http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geok/geok_2.htm
Below, in the "external links" section, is a link to a color image
of O'Keeffe's gigantic cloudscape entitled "Sky Above Clouds IV" (
1965; oil on
canvas; 8 x 24 ft.; Art
Institute of Chicago). Such "airborne-view" cloudscapes are in
a sense aerial
landscapes, except that typically there is no view of the land
at all: only white clouds, suspended in (and even below) blue
sky.