I love to gaze at a blue sky filled with fluffy white clouds. In January, blue skies are rare and fluffy white clouds are even less likely, at least from ground level. It seems that day after chilly day we gaze up at flat grey clouds.
Intellectually, I know that winter clouds are technically white. In fact, from the sky above clouds, the view would be different.
Late in her life, artist Georgia O’Keeffe began painting her series of 11 cloudscapes inspired by views from the airplane windows. Why white clouds? Who knows! Maybe after painting autumn-colored leaves, over-sized pastel and vivid flowers and desert-bleached bones, she found the white clouds intriguing.
I remember first seeing “Sky Above the Clouds, IV” — a gigantic painting at the top of the grand staircase at the Art Institute of Chicago. While there is a bit of pink at the horizon line, and blue showing between them, the stylized clouds are white.
White is the equally scattered combination of all of the spectrum colors and indeed, unless there is a great deal of particulate matter in the sky (remember the smoky skies a couple summers ago) or the Sun is very low in the sky, clouds are white because they have a constant source of white sunlight.
So if clouds are white, why are winter and storm clouds grey? Clouds are made up of an unimaginable number of water molecules, mostly in the form of ice crystals. In a thick cloud, these molecules block the sunlight passing through the clouds. The bottom of a cloud is actually its shadow.
In this time of short days, clouds reduce the amount of light we perceive, which can be depressing. But just imagining the "Sky Above Clouds" gives me hope.
