To feed their art, artists often like to travel. Close to home, like Claude Monet and his backyard gardens at Giverny. A little farther, like Georgia O’Keeffe, who left New York for a fresh perspective in New Mexico. Or halfway around the world, like Paul Gauguin, who traded Paris for lush and exotic Tahiti.
In modern-day Amherst, Massachusetts, Chris Page simply looks up.
An essentially self-taught artist who doesn’t just love making art, but does it because “it feels more like a necessity,” he’s lately been finding inspiration in clouds. Watching their never-ending, always surprising transformations opens him up, artistically and personally – and he believes anyone can benefit from doing the same.
Getting out in nature is often recommended as an antidote to the stress of struggling with problems or breaking through mental obstacles. Taking a walk in the woods or, for Page, looking at the sky is a way to step away from “a frontal attack on a problem,” he says. “The sky counters my tendency to want to box everything in, or be ‘the answer,’ or be perfect.” By observing – or witnessing, as he likes to say – the chaotic movement of clouds and tuning in to his emotional response, his perspective shifts. His mind loosens.
“If you can become comfortable with uncertainty at an intuitive level, it can allow for a more fluid and open relationship with yourself and your work,” Page says.
Following a series of paintings with images blending land and sky, and another of streams, Page is now striving to capture the subtleties of ephemeral clouds in acrylic paint. “I’m often trying to find ways to arrive at patterns that don’t feel predictable, that feel elusive,” he says. “Almost verging on invisible.”
He’s not quite the gestural Action painter Jackson Pollock was, but Page employs similar techniques. “I’ll often set up some sort of rhythm and let the rhythm play out,” he says. “A particular quality starts to emerge,” and then he’ll make adjustments as needed to create a coherent finished piece.
But besides making art out of communing with clouds, Page wants to encourage other people to look up. The sky is dynamic, it’s chaotic, it can be mesmerizing – it’s “the miracle above us that’s always being miraculous, often taken for granted.”
He believes the process could benefit anyone, whether they’re facing difficult business decisions or enhancing their spiritual practice. Taking in the sky’s qualities of constant motion, ambiguity, and perceived infinity, Page believes, helps shift the mind’s typical patterns. Watching clouds is a way “to help get to a place where having an Aha! moment would be likely to occur.”
To that end, he intends to set up a consulting practice offering approaches to cloud-watching for anyone wishing to loosen their mind and discover new ways of looking at things. In the meantime, when he’s not enjoying the overhead view outside at Amherst Coffee, he’s translating what he sees – and feels – on canvas at his home studio.
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