Mary Jacobus on Clouds

“clouds draw the eye upward: to movement, distance, and height, to the dynamics of space and the overarching sky. For most of us, they provoke ideas about both transcendence and inwardness. When we look up, we lose ourselves”

“clouds, I want to argue, make us think not only about form and vacancy, mobility and change, but also about the peculiar realm of affectivity that we call ‘mood’… mood is like the weather, changing and unformed, yet always with us. In classical landscape painting, weather and mood tend to converge on the drama of the sky”

“they evoke fleeting states of mind, feeling, and atmosphere. As they mount or move across the sky, they become a language for inner activity: darkening here, lightening there, here an ascent, there a draying or an accumulation of intensity; a passage of calm before a storm or a glimpse of cerulean sky”

Mary Jacobus, "Cloud Studies"

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents