On Painting Skies > Inspiration for Artists
By David Jenks
djenks.com
I took up painting seriously over 40 years ago. For a long time, I was primarily a plein air artist and had worked that way in California, Arizona, and the Maine coast. I eventually settled in Mendocino on what is called the North Coast, about 160 miles above San Francisco. Although I’ve spent quality time doing portraits and still lifes, I gradually gravitated to painting seascapes, which became the springboard for my enduring focus on the sky over the ocean.
When I first started painting, a mentor advised me to study light. Since the sun never sits still in our sky, to me that meant following in the path of Monet and the impressionists by returning to the same spot two or three or more times to catch the scene at the same time of day. After an hour or two, the highlights and the shadows have moved.
A few years later an Arizona gallery owner told me he was most interested in paintings of “special moments.” To me, that meant effects that one cannot return to day after day because they are one-off events. That is the intrinsic nature of the sky over the ocean; clouds move faster than the sun. At the beginning and the end of the day the colors and the light are the most interesting, dramatic, and fleeting. Thus capturing special moments involves some luck—being in the right place at the right time. But the more I focused on painting skies in my work, the more time I spent working from reference photos in the studio.
In the Southwest I also came across the work of Wilson Hurley (1924-2008), a great New Mexico artist who painted everything, including gorgeous skies. He had been a military pilot and flying enthusiast, so he had a particular insight into that subject. A picture of one of his paintings has been perched on the table next to my easel for many years.
A sunrise or sunset over the land is a painting of the sky with nothing but silhouettes beneath. But over the ocean, the sky is reflected in the water, which acts as a foil for the light above and gives an earthly context and dimension to the heavenly delight. I call these pictures “Sea&Skyscapes.” My work tends to be on the larger side because the sky is a very big subject and demands it. The paintings also tend to be detailed, which I feel helps to make them convincing.
In any event, whether over the land or the sea, painting light is my passion—like a moth attracted to a flame. This is partly the case because light, for me, is also symbolic of a spiritual reality. Our light is also The Light—the source and the necessary ingredient for our life here in the world.
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