Study in Sky Blue (Feed/Nourish)

The sky is always there, expansive and eternal. Even in a place where the landscape is banal or depressing, the sky is above. And the sky unifies: because I know what is over the next hill, the sky for me represents a kind of continuity with other places I cannot see. Even as a child, I would look up at it and then try to figure out where things were. Over there, to the east but a little south, under that set of clouds? That would be where Mount Hood is. Over there, where the blue bleeds into a hazy yellow with the distance, I imagined the vast Willamette Valley stretched out.

Funny, though, that when I paint a landscape, how often I treat the sky as something to be dispensed with efficiently, as a potential point of failure that needs to be contained. The sky, in my painted world, is so often a mere backdrop, meant not to be looked at, like the blown-out, all-white skies of 19th century photographers.

Partly it is fear. Look up on a good day, a blue day, and try to name that color. Try to explain why the blue is not blue but a kind of purple, and yet for inexplicable reasons it has a yellow cast at the edges. Or why a late sky, which yellows even more, can fade to blue but never turns green. In truth I think the sky isn't blue, it is many blues. These are things even a small child can learn, laying in the grass looking up, even if they cannot be fully explained then, or now.

Study in Sky Blue, Watercolor, 12 inches x16 inches, 2016.