the clouds are silky yarn, magenta, and crimson
on looking up amidst the changing seasons
The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light, It’s a little early for all this. Everything’s still very bare— nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday. The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson.
— Louise Glück, March
My very first encounter with Georgia O’Keeffe was Sky Above Clouds IV at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide, hanging above a grand staircase descending down the second floor of the Michigan Avenue Building, it was impossible to miss—I was stunned.
There’s the visual shock of seeing a canvas so vast, the serenity of Jet-Puffed marshmallow-like clouds on deep indigo fading into the horizon, a stratosphere of ethereal blues and pinks that contain infinity within. Somewhere in the flat abstraction of the clouds, in their primordial geometry, in their theatrical simplicity, in their opacity and solidified stillness, and in their repetition, I find ritual and reverence - almost like white cobblestones paving a path towards the boundary of pattern, landscape, and what we know.
Of course, O’Keeffe is known for her use of repetition, often in process and/ or subject matter. As its name suggests, Sky Above Clouds IV is the fourth and last of O’Keeffe’s collection of cloudscapes during the 1960s, when O’Keeffe was in her 70s. Traveling around the world, O’Keeffe was exhilarated by the view she saw from the airplane window. This final cloudscape is her most ambitious undertaking yet, completed in the garage of her Ghost Ranch, New Mexico house. She would often work from six a.m. in the morning until eight or nine at night, a process she repeated day after day to make the expansive imaginative cloudscape corporeal.
A scene in Breaking Bad offers one of my favorite interpretations of O’Keeffe’s repetition: in an episode called Abiquiú, Jesse Pinkman and Jane Margolis visit the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe and saw My Last Door, the final rendition of over twenty of O’Keefe’s abstracted references to the black door from her Abiquiu house. Jesse argues that O’Keeffe’s repeated painting of the same door is to achieve perfection, but Jane contests that repetition is an active act of remembering, to make a good feeling last.
In my most recent visit to Chicago’s Art Institute in the fall of 2022, I got to see Sky Above Clouds IV again and could not help but smile. It was like running into an old friend. Now, on the many sun-less, cloudless days of New York winter where the air is chilling cold and the sky is a blank void, I often think back to O’Keeffe’s clouds: what a luxury it is to really see clouds with child-like exhilaration, to dare to dream beyond, and all the good feelings they make last: levity, lightness, and the reassurance that our infinitesimal existence still has meaning.
The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes; it doesn’t lie. You ask the sea, what can you promise me and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.
— Louise Glück, March (continued)
Why does looking at the sky and the clouds matter?
In his essay A Cloud Society, New York Times Magazine journalist Jon Mooallem writes of an amateur society of cloud watchers who identified a new cloud feature:
Here you have a discrete, scientific, analytic urge laid onto the embodiment of a chaos, onto these formations within these unbounded pockets of our atmosphere where there’s no beginning and no edge. All [they] wanted was to encourage people to look at the sky, to elevate our perception of clouds as beautiful for their own sake.
Amac, an artist, author of
, and fellow Stanford alum I greatly look up to, lives in Joshua Tree. Her latest work is a collection of sky paintings, where she explores her relationship with the desert sky:Living in the desert, you touch the sky. In the city if you’re lucky, the sun hits your face. If the avenue is big enough and a ray can shine through a crack in the buildings you might sneak a kiss. In the desert, every inch of your body touches the sky. you are immersed in it — the sky — just like you are immersed in the sand. It comes with the territory of being exposed; the benefit of having nowhere to hide is that the sky embraces you, every moment, from morning until night and back again. In the desert, you touch the sky which makes you realize just how long you’ve gone untouched. It’s painful, and it’s sweet.
I am very fortunate that both my apartment and office in the city are tall enough and with floor-to-ceiling windows for me to see the sky as much as I can. But still, I find myself more aware of the sky when I am outside New York: by the ocean where the sea and the sky meets, along a hike where nothing stands between me and the sky, lying on my back on a grassy field to stare at unbounded blue adorned with white, and of course, peeking outside the airplane window as O’Keeffe would.
To me, the never-ending vastness of the horizon reminds me that the world is large, beyond ourselves, and often daunting— there is snow behind the Hollywood sign and floods and California—which Manhattan’s concrete artifice sometimes makes me forget but I so badly want to remember.
We watch the crescent moon,
very faint at first, then clearer and clearer
as the sky grows dark.
Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns
and violets.— Louise Glück, March (continued)
Eventually, I painted my very own miniature of Sky Above Clouds IV with a watercolor resist technique I learned back in kindergarten: layer the clouds onto paper with white oil pastels and wash over the the page with watercolor. Wax and water don’t mix - washes of watercolor beaded off the oil pastel clouds and stained the paper. An indigo sky and the distant horizon came into focus.
I chose to hang my Sky Above Clouds IV above the shoe case in my apartment’s entry way. It’s the last thing I see as I head out the door every morning - a reminder to go out and reach for some clouds today.
“Jesse argues that O’Keeffe’s repeated painting of the same door is to achieve perfection, but Jane contests that repetition is an active act of remembering, to make a good feeling last.” 💓