Why Do Artists Paint the Sky?
Revelers gathered at Ann Craven’s church in Thomaston, Maine, on July 21st to celebrate “A Particular Kind of Heaven,” an expansive group show organized by Karma. The sky outside was crisp and azure, with white, wispy clouds. Inside, though, over 100 unique stratospheres abounded, inspired by the changing moods of this celestial canvas.
It’s the fourth year that Karma has organized a summer show at Craven’s space, but this one’s its largest yet. On view through September 1st, the exhibition takes its name from an Ed Ruscha print—one in a series of works with text superimposed on the sky. From this starting point, the show presents sky-based artworks from 70 modern and contemporary artists.
The sky’s far-away mystery has captivated humanity’s imagination for millenia. Ancient Greeks, for instance, believed the sky was a dome consisting of the god Ouranos’s body, held up by the titan Atlas. No matter the state of life on earth, the sky looms high above us, steadfast yet ever-changing. Artists across eras have worked with this omnipresent visual element, from the Romantic painters to contemporary talents like James Turrell and Anish Kapoor.
Craven herself is famous for her moon paintings. Although she makes most of them en plein air at night, Craven paints daytime moons, too. “The day moon offers me hope that there’s going to be a great night moon,” the artist said in an interview with Artsy. She’s worked with the sky ever since her parents passed, Craven said, because she finds solace in remembering they saw the same sky she does.
In the house of worship that serves as both Craven’s studio and an exhibition space, an expansive landscape by New York–based artist Nathaniel Oliver entitled Over Here (2024) beckons guests through the entrance. Oliver has built a meteoric career on narrative vignettes that infuse Black figuration with magical realism. Like Ruscha, Oliver often uses the sky as a compositional foundation. In some works, like Further Together (2022) and You Can Smell The Storm (2022), the sky swirls around figures like a character itself, in the form of weather. But Over Here is Oliver’s first painting without people. Its blue sky reflects in a lake, or perhaps a river, at the base of a majestic mountain. The sky is not far away here: It’s an active participant in life on earth.
Aspiring to the sublime
While airplane travel has diminished some of the sky’s unattainability over the past century, it seems no amount of rocket fuel can dissolve the sky’s portentous allure. Many contemporary artists are elaborating on the time-honored transcendental approach, beyond the scope of Karma’s show. For example, Montreal-based artist Joani Tremblay creates playful depictions of the sky in her charged, framed landscapes, partly imagined and partly based on reference images. Her latest paintings focus on mountainous horizon lines, but some, like Untitled (Rain) (2023), depict clouds alone. “Sky means vastness and vastness means room for questions,” Tremblay wrote over email, adding, “Like real life, the skies are usually the source of light in the paintings, the source of luminosity.”
But for artists, transcendentalism doesn’t necessarily mean spirituality: The rhythmic qualities and color palette of a painting can create material impacts on the brain, according to the rising field of neuroaesthetics.
New York–based painter Amy Lincoln’s acrylic meditations promote centeredness and mental health through repeating natural features like trees and waves, interspersed throughout sweeping vistas doused with banded gradients of harmonious hues. In an interview, Lincoln explained that although she’s not spiritual, painting “makes me feel happier, calmer, more connected to the world and less in my head.” Looking at her work creates the same effect. She paints idyllic and stormy weather alike, finding beauty in every temporary state.
For Mexico City–born artist Yoab Vera, the horizon line is a meditative sight. “I coined this term for my thesis: ‘haptic contemplative painting,’ because it was both about the texture and the tactility of the touching of the surface,” Vera said in an interview. His painting practice arises in part from his 10-year mediation practice. Vera particularly homed in on the horizon, though, during several weeks painting on Mexico’s Pacific coast. There, he noticed people who would gather on the beach and marvel at the sunset daily, like a ritual.
The sky as a diary
Other artists catalog the sky’s constant fluctuations. Several small sunsets, portrayed in geometric gradations by the late Light and Space painter Norman Zammit, appear in “A Particular Kind of Heaven.” Their stark lines evoke recent explorations elsewhere by Brooklyn-based artist Rob Pruitt. In works like A Month of Sunsets (November 2023) (2023), Pruitt captures the light show at the end of each day in dreamy, semi-abstract gradations, for a month straight—then lines them all up in the structure of that month’s calendar. Pruitt treats every sunset with the utmost attention to detail, portraying it like a fingerprint of that day.
“I’d been photographing with my iPhone the daily sunset for some time: a wordless journal of skies marking the passing of time in 24hr cycles,” Pruitt wrote in an email interview. “The sunset may be a cliché but it’s also a visual phenomenon that we all stop to take in (when we happen to catch it),” he said, comparing such works to “much more sentimental” versions of On Kawara’s “Date Paintings.”
Rob Pruitt, A Month of Sunsets (November 2023), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Pruitt’s project, in turn, evokes an ongoing series by San Diego–based artist Byron Kim, who’s painted a swath of the daytime sky once a week consistently since January 2001. These “Sunday Paintings” all pair the artist’s upward view with a succinct entry encapsulating life that week, from his kids’ soccer games to his studio chores. Kim has presented selections from this series in several shows, most recently at James Cohan Gallery in 2018.
“One of my main subject matters is not necessarily the sky but the relationship between big and small,” Kim said. Inspired by Taoism, he pits polar opposites against each other to locate their unity. Recently, Kim has started painting scenes that introduce elements like the horizon to explore scale further, but he plans on making the “Sunday Paintings” until he can’t anymore. This diaristic approach is one way in which artists can claim a bit of the sky for themselves.
Sky as an agent in its own right
Sarah Cunningham, Limbo, 2024. © Sarah Cunningham. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
But the sky isn’t just a faceless site for humanity’s projections. Numerous artists beyond the Karma show highlight its agency—like London-based artist Sarah Cunningham, whose first-ever L.A. exhibition “Flight Paths” at Lisson Gallery focuses on the sky, debuting a new series of works inspired by aerial movements, from chemtrails to the hyperspeed of light. By condensing numerous states of the sky into singular canvases with her vigorous brushstrokes, Cunningham makes clear that even apparently static blue skies are an illusion made of constantly moving and dissipating rays of the sun’s radiating white light.
“I often feel that I am in flight when I am painting,” Cunningham wrote in an email interview, regarding her new series. “The reason that this method of ‘taking flight’ is so important to me and such a dynamic part of these paintings is that in each work you can follow a kind of story, like an essential narrative, that feels relevant in its own time.”
New York–based Jarrett Key also thwarts the traditional hierarchy placing the sky at the top of a composition in works like Blue Flying Feather Fall (2024). The sky has steadily overtaken Key’s concrete frescoes since they started making them about five years ago. The shift started, in part, due to their love for Haint blue—an indigo pigment used in the South to ward off Haint spirits.
The skies in Key’s recent show “BlueBird” at 1969 Gallery were alive with spirits. A face in the sky peers through a window in Look Up To See (all works 2024). The clouds in I Am The Blue Bird coalesce into the loose shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sky swirls and invigorates Key’s characters—the silhouette of a bird even emerges above Jump To Feel Their Arms, where Key has imprinted the creature in a slightly darker blue than the rest of the sky. “The sky almost protects this bird,” Key said during a walkthrough of the show. “It allows this bird to be incognito, to disappear.”
While humanity no longer considers the sky a vast unknowable god, it still holds a deep allure for many artists. Indeed, science is catching up to art—every new discovery raises only more questions. The sky might draw closer to artists, becoming more fathomable over time, but their experimentations will always grow deeper.
Explore available sky-related artworks in the collection “Skyscapes.”
Correction: this article has been edited to better reflect Amy Lincoln’s medium, which is acrylic, not pastels.
