Photo: Joshua Ware.
Ian Fisher art, “Atmosphere No. 139 (Nate & Marissa)” (2022), oil on canvas.
My friend Nancy L. is a fan of beautiful cloud formations. She is also a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, where she signed up for cloud-a-day photos and bought a bumper sticker that reads, “I brake for clouds.”
If you think about it, gazing at clouds can really enrich a life. Try stopping where you are sometime and just looking up.
An article by Sommer Browning at Hyperallergic talks about what clouds have meant to a couple of artists.
She writes that the paintings in the “Carey Fisher” exhibit at the Redline Contemporary Art Center in Denver last December were “as expansive and composed as one might expect from landscape paintings, though there isn’t much land in them. The exhibition of new works by Albuquerque-based Beau Carey and Denver-based Ian Fisher, alumni of RedLine’s artist residency program, takes place mainly in the sky, among mountain tops, the moon, and the clouds. The horizon line is often thousands of feet below view or occluded by giant ancient rocks.
“Carey chooses realistic depictions of mountain peaks and ranges as one of his main subjects, but his work in this exhibition is kaleidoscopic. In ‘Solaris’ (2022), a celestial sphere seems to rise multiple times behind multiple mountain ranges. It might be a moon the color of the sun, or the sun looking as cold and harsh as the moon. The mountain range vibrates with rich purples and Martian-like colors.
“Some of the paintings, like ‘Folie a Deux’ (2022), look like reflections of themselves — the mountain ranges repeat down the canvas, almost upside down at times. In ‘Magdalenfjorden’ (2022), a stark heavenly circle casts a cold glow across a mountain valley. The mountain paintings remind me of the delirium of standing on a cliff. The moon/sun paintings evoke quarantine feelings of desolation; I remembered wondering, after a couple of weeks, if I had forgotten how to interact with other people.
“Fisher paints exquisite hyperrealist oil paintings of cloud formations. He manages to paint these ephemeral, giant puffs of water vapor with such attention and detail that the paintings seem somehow more real than real clouds. … What is approaching transcendent really, is the perspective. I’d have to be flying to see clouds at these angles, to see them this close. But here there was nothing — not a 747’s plexiglass window, not a camera lens — between me and the cloud. It’s as though what I was seeing is how clouds see each other in the sky. …
“The effect of seeing both painters’ work together is disorienting, unmooring. The longer I looked at Carey’s orange moons and icy mountain-scapes and Fisher’s impossible, vertiginous vistas, the more I wobbled. To be removed from the world by looking at paintings of our world is a wonderful experience. That would have been enough to carry (no pun intended) the show, but the exhibition wall text encourages viewers to draw connections to climate change, which feels a bit unearned. … For a while there, Carey and Fisher had me floating.”
I am reminded of a beautiful N.C. Wyeth painting you may have seen of an old man and a young boy digging a trench in the snow. The boy is looking down, focused on the digging. The old man is standing still, gazing up at the light on the snow, the sky, the clouds. So moving.
More at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall. Subscriptions solicited.
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