Blue sky with clouds (2021) Painting by Ekaterina Zavadskaia
One-of-a-kind works of art are also known as “OOAK” artworks. This means that every work of art is unique and there will never be another identical one.
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Picture from my series “Look at the sky”. The fact that behind their affairs and bustle very often people do not notice the beauty around, everyone of course can see beauty in something of their own, someone sees a riot of colors in the stone and the old wall, so it is. The sky for me is a symbol of purity and holiness, but it also has a[. ]
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Picture from my series “Look at the sky”. The fact that behind their affairs and bustle very often people do not notice the beauty around, everyone of course can see beauty in something of their own, someone sees a riot of colors in the stone and the old wall, so it is. The sky for me is a symbol of purity and holiness, but it also has a different mood, this is what I wanted to capture and show in my paintings.)
On the front side there is a signature, and on the back – the Title, date and signature.
After finishing, the paintings are covered with a special varnish (to protect them from harsh sunlight and dust).
All my works are carefully and individually wrapped, and their protection is reinforced with sturdy cardboard packaging for safe passage.
Please see my other work to learn more about color creations 🙂
About this artwork: Classification, Techniques & Styles
Paint consisting of pigments bound with linseed oil or carnations. The traditional technique consists of superimposing layers of paint increasingly rich in oil for a solid and durable hanger.
Paint using traditional pigments mixed with synthetic resins.
Painting is an art form of painting on a surface by aesthetically applying colored fluids. Painters represent a very personal expression on supports such as paper, rock, canvas, wood, bark, glass, concrete and many other substrates. Work of representation or invention, painting can be naturalistic and figurative, or abstract. It can have narrative, descriptive, symbolic, spiritual, or philosophical content.
Sky above Clouds IV
Painted in the summer of 1965, when Georgia O’Keeffe was 77 years old, this monumental work culminates a series inspired by the artist’s experiences as an airplane passenger during the 1950s. Working in Abiquiu, New Mexico, O’Keeffe began around 1963 to capture the endless expanses of clouds she had observed from airplane windows during trips all over the world. Beginning with a relatively realistic depiction of small white clouds on a three-by-four-foot canvas, she progressed to more stylized images of the motif on larger surfaces. O’Keeffe wrote:
“I painted a painting eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide—it kept me working every minute from six a.m. till eight or nine at night as I had to be finished before it was cold—I worked in the garage and it had no heat—Such a size is of course ridiculous but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do for a couple of years.”
In 1970 Sky above Clouds IV was scheduled to be included in a retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. After being shown in New York and Chicago, the painting was determined to be too large to enter the doors of the museum in San Francisco. It thus remained on loan to the Art Institute for more than a decade, while the artist and public-minded collectors of her art arranged for it to join the museum’s permanent collection.
The special relationship between O’Keeffe and the Art Institute began in 1905, when she enrolled as a student at the School of the Art Institute. Her first museum retrospective was organized here in 1943. Later, as the executor for the estate of her husband, the pioneering American photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe presented the Art Institute with an important group of modernist works, including a number of her own, many of which are on view in the galleries of American art. She continued to make significant additions to this bequest until her death, at age 98, in 1986.
The How of Painting Clouds and Sky
We saw volume. Hundreds of artists sent in images of sky paintings. It was extremely difficult to pare it down to just 50 to showcase here in PleinAir Today. And second, we saw quality. There are a lot of good painters out there, with a heartening diversity of painting approaches. We selected the 30 paintings here based in part on that—variety.
The wonderful expressions of sky and clouds got us thinking about past stories in PleinAir Today. Some experts on painting clouds have offered their thoughts on the subject over the years. Consider the words of two of them, Scott Gellatly and Christine Labich.
“Clouds are ephemeral,” Gellatly points out. “They come together, they break apart, they change shape before your eyes and move across the sky. How do you paint something from that which is ever-changing?” Gellatly says he approached it in several different ways, creating a composite of direct observation, memory, and invention. He tried to capture the “shape and personality” of the clouds, but felt free to add features of the clouds that suddenly appeared during the process. But most pieces started with one moment. “When one part of the sky stops my eye, that is what I want to paint,” he says. “It may be the condition or quality of light that I want to paint, or an interesting shape. That particular aspect of the cloud will certainly change during the painting session. The painting is a balance of staying true to that thing I wanted to express in the first place and letting the painting evolve along with the changes in the sky—taking into account features elsewhere in the sky.”
So none of his paintings are highly accurate portraits of a particular cloud group. This doesn’t bother Gellatly in the least. He considers this aspect of the paintings to be squarely in the plein air tradition. “You can never capture all of the elements from the entire time of the painting session faithfully,” he points out.
Gellatly achieved the soft-look characteristic of most clouds by mixing colors more on the surface than on the palette. “There are softer transitions of color and value which allude to a more atmospheric, airy quality of the sky, juxtaposed with sharper, crisper marks to describe the more solid structure of the cloudscape. Within the muted colors, there are distinct temperature variations that offer a push and pull of pictorial space, and these areas are broken up by the lighter, purer blues to punch through to clear sky. Also visible in this section are defined brush-marks against the smoother areas of manipulating the paint with a palette knife. In this series of paintings in particular, I felt that the more ‘painterly’ the approach, the more convincing the result became.”
Many of us have done cloud studies, but Gellatly discovered that paintings of clouds offered a deeply involving variety of challenges, especially when the horizon line was cropped out of the scene. “By completely removing any element of the horizon line, I opened up the composition,” Gellatly says. “It made for a great challenge—working to ensure an engaging composition with a foundation in landscape painting but without a horizon line. How do I divide up the composition without showing a horizon line?”
There are accepted guidelines for painting clouds. Their values are usually not terribly different from the sky color. They are darker underneath. Clouds usually lie on a plane that extends to the horizon, so perspective comes into play. Christine Labich knows these rules, and she likes to stretch against them. “The more you paint clouds the more fun it is to push those boundaries a little bit,” says the artist. “The hard and fast rules about sky can be broken down.”
Labich feels that working in the medium of pastels helps her to be more adventuresome with color in the clouds. “With pastel, all the colors are laid out in front of you,” she says. “I can try a little splotch of this or that when I might not bother to mix that in oil. I might never think to put a putty color or another neutral in a cloud to work for a transition between layers, but it does. I often find the transitional color from the dark underside of a cloud to the lit upper-side very surprising.”
Clouds can change within seconds. Labich loves fast-moving clouds, even if they are the most difficult to capture. She knows that these clouds are the ones that she must memorize, and invent, to some degree. “The backlit ones that are shifting very quickly are interesting to me,” says Labich. “A day that is windy with a high-pressure system passing through, with strong breaks of sun—those are fun. I feel rushed when painting the clouds. There is an excitement about painting them, a realization that this is going to happen really fast. They are always changing. You have to be on your best game to do this. I enjoy that rousing challenge. A plein air painter has to learn how to capture some details, but more importantly I want the personality of the clouds to come through.”
Any suggestions on a theme for the next PleinAir Today painting challenge? Share them in the comments below!
