Arts Design

THE NEW ART OF CLOUDS

Berndnaut Smilde. Nimbus Green Room 2013

Clouds are works of performance art. They are portraits of weather and time. They are constantly changing, presenting different faces and moods. And while we’ve explored the natural beauty of clouds all week long, today, we look at the artist’s take on clouds.

A cloud inside a room is a floating sculpture, created by Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde. It lasts only for a brief moment in time -- just long enough for him to snap a photo to prove this work’s existence and to save it for us to admire on into the future.

Part artist, part scientist, part magician, Smilde fuses all three talents to create masterpieces that defy belief in his Nimbus I (2010), Nimbus II (2012) and ongoing Nimbus series. They are like reverse Magritte's, with the cloud as the focused subject and the room as the backdrop, equally surreal -- or perhaps even more so.

Photo: Berndnaut Smilde. Nimbus II

Smilde starts with a vacant room, considering color of the walls, floors, and ceilings, as well as the light sources. He creates these ephemeral interior landscapes by introducing smoke and moisture to form beautiful puffs that hang in midair, lighting them to give them life. Eerie, alien, ethereal, cartoonlike, whimsical, delicate, exquisite, and genius, all at once, Smilde’s productions will captivate you every time, and never really let you go. You’ll find the images flash back into your consciousness long after you’ve first experienced them.

Smilde’s works are currently in exhibitions throughout the Netherlands, including in Heerlen (9/1/2013-10/30/2013), Rotterdam (9/14/2013- 1/5/2014), and Maastricht (9/14/2013-1/12/2013).

Photo: Courtesy of Exploratorium. Fog Bridge exhibition

Fog is a form of cloud. While it mainly obscures things, fog can create its own beauty. And, in the mind and hands of Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya, fog is art. Nakaya uses a fog system to shape large scale interactive cloud exhibits. Her current exhibition (through October 6, 2013), entitled “Fog Bridge #72494,” is fog art in a foggy city, installed on a pedestrian bridge as part of Exploratorium in San Francisco, uses water pumped through 800 nozzles, with holes just 120 microns wide, at high pressure. The work is even more transformative as it is lit at night. You can take a stroll through these dense clouds, letting them envelop you and incorporate your body into their ever-changing masterpiece.

Growing up as the daughter of the physicist and science essayist Ukichiro Nakaya, renowned for his work in glaciology and snow crystal photography, Nakaya has always been fascinated with the beauty of water and weather, in all of its forms. She’s been making art out of fog for a long time now -- she is 79 years old. Working as part of the legendary group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), she enshrouded the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka in fog, becoming the first artist to create a sculptural fog environment. She has created fog gardens, landscapes, falls and geysers around the world.

Nakaya has permanent exhibits in Nakaya Ukichiro Museum of Snow and Ice in Ishikawa, Japan; the Australian National Gallery in Canberra; and the Jardin de L'Eau, in the Parc de la Villette, Paris.

Photo: Ward Davenny. Dust and Hail.

Air, water, and light are a cloud artists media, whether the artist is human, weather, or divine in nature. Some artists, like Ward Davenny, add elements like smoke to the mix, for contrast. Davenny, associate art professor at Dickinson College, also uses smoke in preparing his canvasses, letting it pass across their prepared surfaces to create their own special effects. He is moved by storm clouds and tornadoes, in particular.

Unlike the delicate light and air qualities of Smilde and Nakaya’s cloud art, "Clouds, Smoke and Vapors," Davenny’s most recent exhibit at HACC's Rose Lehrman Art Gallery, showed the ominous, sometimes dangerous, personalities of clouds, highlighting their darker beautiful nature.

Photo: Courtesy of Tetsuo Kondo Architects. Cloudscapes

The "Cloudscapes" art installation is a collaboration between Japanese studio Tetsuo Kondo Architects and environmental engineering firm Transsolar, marrying hard-edged minimalist architecture with feathery floating clouds. The clouds are formed from air, heated and cooled, pumped through the cube-shaped structure in three distinct layers: cold air on the bottom, warm humid air in the middle, and hot dry air on the top.

The Cloudscapes installation (second in the series), recently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo invites you to enter the 6-meter high cube, reminiscent of the Apple flagship store in Manhattan, and climb a staircase through the cloud to the top of the two-story structure. Over time, during the day, with changing surrounding weather, the color, density and brightness of the cloud changes. If you can’t make it to Japan to experience Cloudscapes in person, you can check out a series of amazing images on Tetsuo Kondo's site.

Read about the beauty of Clouds all this week, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including Head in Clouds, Feet on Ground, The Wild Beauty of Clouds, New Clouds, New Life, New Beauty, and New Tastes as Light as Clouds.