"Sky Above Clouds IV"

“Sky Above Clouds IV,” oil on canvas by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1965

This painting is massive. Twenty-four feet long by eight feet tall, “Sky Above Clouds IV” was painted by American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe with the aid of assistants in 1965 when she was seventy-seven years old. Row after row of white ovals shrink into the distance towards a blue and pink horizon. A pair of massive, identical plaques state the painting was inspired by commercial air travel and the experience of looking down on clouds from above. It’s surprising to learn how representational the painting actually is. As someone who has been flying since before he could crawl, I’ve seen what this image is describing—many times—and I didn’t get it, but it got me.

            Most of the elements imply an ostentatious cartoonish quality. The clouds are cobblestones, or marshmallows, or rigid rectangular plant cells, or anything other than clouds. Their white is absolute and so it appears an exaggeration of some near-white symbol. Convention would surely have the pure white of clouds apologetically covered by shades of gray or streaks of blue. The ordered rows are too obviously created, and upon inspection columns emerge as well. A handful of wayward globs are the exceptions that prove the rule. Above all else the painting seems to be attempting to convey a long perspective, but of numerous techniques painters employ for this, only the crudest is used, size. The clouds, in imperfect intervals, gradually shrink from torso-sized to fingeresque ascending. There is no shading, no reference in space, no true illusion of perspective. As with the seemingly abstract subject matter, the true dimensions can be learned but they are not instinctually understood. One must view the change in size and imagine the intended effect in space.

            In O’Keeffe’s earlier paintings of flowers, the gradient from realism to abstract advanced along with the magnification of the image and inversely to the literal space conveyed in the frame. In the “Sky Above Clouds” series it moves from puffy to geometric, with respect to the clouds. But IV is the one that is meant to be seen. This is the huge one, beckoning stares. This is the one as grand as the commercial airline industry appeared in the ‘60s. For the same reason this painting does a poor job of conveying the literal experience of looking down from above the clouds, it succeeds in conveying what’s really key to that experience—a sense of wonder.

 There’s more than just a grammatical relationship between wondering what this image is showing and wonderment at its impressiveness of scale and color. Part of the true experience of passing through the clouds is the dissociated acknowledgment that while fantastic, it is perpetually foreign. We might on one level understand where we are, but that knowledge will always be conscious, not inherent like our knowledge of the smell of rain.