Heavy Sky

Oil on linen panel

24 x 18 inches

This painting is in the collection of the Art Museum of Eastern Idaho. 

The idea for “Heavy Sky” came during a time of sadness. Life felt heavy, and this painting became a way to express some of that heaviness, to find beauty inside of struggle. I wanted the trees to appear to be bearing the weight of the sky. The clouds are dark, a space of abstract textures and patterns, and the horizon cuts across the painting to become a boundary for the forms of the trees. 

Although this painting is about emotional weight, it is also about hope. Over the course of the weeks that I worked on this piece, I felt myself more and more drawn toward the break in the clouds just above the horizon; I kept making it brighter and more yellow as time went on and as the weight of my emotions lifted. 

There were two paintings that helped form some of the ideas in this composition, in mood and in structure. The first was Jean-Francois Millet’s “The Gleaners,” where Millet uses the horizon as a barrier and weight over the figures that stoop in the labor of their gathering. The second was Egon Schiele’s “Winter Tree,” where the bare tree is a pattern of flowing lines across a white sky, stark and haunting.