Connections/Clouds

My name is Keith Christiansen. I'm the chairman of the department of European paintings, but basically just a frustrated curator. And my topic is "Clouds" because I've become crazy about clouds. When I see a

spectacular sky, something that really grabs me and takes me out of myself, I feel compelled to take a photograph of it. It's not

a record of a place I've been to, rather an emotion that I've felt, standing before it. I've

always loved to lie on my back and stare up at the sky. And you get these constant shifts of light, forms moving, different perceptions of space.

Even the greatest coloristic aberrations could not surpass the aberration that nature wreaked on herself. One day

when I arrived a few blocks away from where I live, between the cornices of the buildings was this extraordinary sky and it was a true El Greco experience. And I realized

how real that sky behind the View of Toledo is. That it's not simply an arbitrary expressionist sky, but it's a particular moment that El Greco had internalized.

Artists use clouds to give a different emotional tone to their pictures, like Ruisdael, when he painted his Wheat Fields. And one of the things that strikes me in that is the kind of ordinary stillness of the lower part and then the extraordinary event taking place overhead. The

great beauty of painting is we can return and recapture a particular feeling, a particular idea. In a cloud formation, two minutes later, it's gone.

Another day, a storm gathered up, and the clouds that I looked up in that day I thought, "It's a Maulbertsch sky!" Absolute baroque sky. The forms of the clouds, the manipulation of light and the way that light took you out, deep into the depths of space.

There are also the sublime skies, when the clouds open up and the rays shine down and it's like heaven. My children--we used to ride in the car--would say, "Oh, look, Dad, it's God!" And it actually has some unearthly visionary quality.

I've begun to wonder about how many figurative artists have actually taken inspiration from what they've seen in clouds. The Guercino "Blinding of Sampson" has large forms, colliding together, illuminated by light. And this to me is something very similar to the experience I have with clouds.

I like to think of clouds as at the very heart of the creative experience of artists.

If you look at Bernard van Orley, it looks very conventional, but if you go up into the sky,

you see that the clouds have taken the formation of angels hovering over the Virgin, and the artist is playing his own creative imagination against the infinite creative powers of nature.

Rain's a downer, I find. It usually kills the drama. It destroys the sense of depth. It covers any variety of light. And a gray wash is not my idea of beauty.

My kids used to always get embarrassed because whenever I'd go out to the playground, as soon as I saw them in the sandbox, I would go lie on a park bench and stare up at the sky. So there's a long history of this. Maybe it's idleness. Or maybe it is age.

There is always that association of clouds with heaven, with the divine.

Of belonging in some fundamental important way to nature. And I think that

reminds us of how much a part of nature we are, that in the end

nature does control us.