For musical works of the same name, see composers Elena Ruehr and Alex Burtzos.
Sky Above Clouds series
Sky above Clouds IV (1965; 8 ft. by 24 ft.): The largest painting O'Keeffe ever produced (Art Institute of Chicago).
Housed at
National Gallery of Art (1) Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (6) Art Institute of Chicago (1) Private collection (3)
Size (no. of items)
11
Sky Above Clouds (1960–1977) is a series of eleven cloudscape paintings by the American modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, produced during her late period. The series of paintings is inspired by O'Keeffe's views from her airplane window during her frequent air travel in the 1950s and early 1960s when she flew around the world. The series begins in 1960 with Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II, the start of a minimalist cycle of six works, with O'Keeffe trying to replicate the view of a solid white cloud she saw while flying back to New Mexico. She would continue to work on this singular motif in Sky with Flat White Cloud, Clouds 5/ Yellow Horizon and Clouds, Sky with Moon, and Sky Above Clouds / Yellow Horizon and Clouds. A darker variation of this motif occurred in 1972, influenced by her battle with macular degeneration, resulting in The Beyond, her last, unassisted painting before losing her eyesight.
In 1962, O'Keeffe experimented with a representational cycle in the series based on a different view she saw while flying, this time of a pink sky above the horizon with patches of cloudlets, or cloud streets below it, rather than a solid mass of clouds. Her first attempt at trying to replicate this view, An Island with Clouds, was unsuccessful, but she began to make significant progress on this theme in 1963 with Above the Clouds I. The momentum carried her through two more variations on the same idea, Sky Above Clouds II and Sky Above Clouds III, with both works twice the size of the first. The final, fourth work in this cycle, Sky Above Clouds IV, is the largest painting ever created by the artist, at two meters (eight feet) high and seven meters (24 feet) wide. O'Keeffe completed this monumental work at the age of 77 in the summer of 1965. Three of the paintings in the series are held by private collectors, while the rest are found in the National Gallery of Art, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
singular motif in Sky with Flat White Cloud, Clouds 5/ Yellow Horizon and Clouds, Sky with Moon, and SkyAboveClouds / Yellow Horizon and Clouds. A darker variation...
obscured by clouds. At night, the Moon, planets, and stars are similarly visible in the sky. Some of the natural phenomena seen in the sky are clouds, rainbows...
clouds and does not rotate. Clouds initially form in clear air or become clouds when fog rises above surface level. The genus of a newly formed cloud...
black sky together with some faint nebulae or clouds of light. In ancient times the stars were often assumed to be equidistant on a dome above the Earth...
orographic clouds (clouds that develop over mountains) has been seasonally increased by about 10%." Despite the mixed scientific results, cloud seeding was...
cirrus clouds. There are two other high-level cirrus-like clouds called cirrostratus and cirrocumulus. Cirrostratus looks like a sheet of cloud, whereas...
Noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. When viewed from space, they are called...
Cloud cover (also known as cloudiness, cloudage, or cloud amount) refers to the fraction of the sky obscured by clouds on average when observed from a...
Organization, is the meteorological condition of clouds obscuring at least 95% of the sky. However, the total cloud cover must not be entirely due to obscuring...
Cumulus clouds are clouds that have flat bases and are often described as puffy, cotton-like, or fluffy in appearance. Their name derives from the Latin...
cirrostratus begins as fragmented of clouds in the sky it often means the front is weak. Cirrostratus is usually located above 5.5 km (18,000 ft). Its presence...
English, this type of cloud has been referred to as a twain cloud for being a combination of two types of clouds. Stratocumulus clouds are rounded clumps...
cirrus clouds. They sometimes appear as bands parallel to the edge of the clouds. Iridescence is also seen in the much rarer polar stratospheric clouds, also...
such clouds are present, pilots may climb above the cloud tops. However, glider pilots actively seek out the rising air to gain altitude. These clouds may...
commingling with the horizon and becoming indistinguishable from the cloud-filled sky. The painting is composed of various elements from the Elbe Sandstone...
direct sunlight for relatively thin clouds down to 1⁄1000 of direct sunlight under the extreme of thickest storm clouds.[citation needed] One of the equations...
Stratus clouds are low-level clouds characterized by horizontal layering with a uniform base, as opposed to convective or cumuliform clouds formed by...
Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), about 163 kly (50 kpc) away Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), about 206 kly (63 kpc) away The Magellanic clouds are visible to...
instability, then the altocumulus clouds become more purely cumuliform in structure. Like other cumuliform and stratocumuliform clouds, altocumulus signifies convection...
depict images of clouds viewed from above, suspended in blue sky, with the land below nowhere to be seen; it is the view of clouds regarded at a downward...
Lenticular clouds (Latin: Lenticularis lentil-shaped, from lenticula lentil) are stationary clouds that form mostly in the troposphere, typically in parallel...
astronomy Dark-sky movement The End of Night (book) International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) Light pollution Night skySky brightness Sky & Telescope (S&T)...
stratus clouds containing sulfuric acid to yield remarkable sunset afterglows (and pre-sunrise glows) around the world. The high altitude clouds serve to...
expect cool temperatures and clouds and fog at the beach. The low-altitude stratus clouds that make up the June Gloom cloud layer form over the nearby ocean...
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