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| Capturing symbols in the sky in Washington DC (2014) |
Have you ever looked up at the sky and seen a sign or shape in the clouds that felt like a personal message just for you? Moments later, it's gone. Fortunately, back in 2014, while I was visiting Washington DC, I had my iPhone in hand and captured this unusual cloud formation in the shape of a question mark. At the time I was taking pictures of everything in sight, wondering about the meaning of everything around me : the monuments, the sculptures, the architectural details, etc. And when I looked up I saw these clouds.
Perhaps this is what started fuel my interest in painting clouds. I painted a few back in 2014 and stopped there. Recently I got back into painting more often, and the clouds are coming back. And as I was uploading the latest cloud painting on my online art store, I stumbled across the word Nephelomantia which, according to occultpedia.com, stems from the greek words nephele which means a cloud and manteia which means divination. So nephelomantia is the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means with the aid of clouds. How cool is that? #LearnedSomethingNew
So since, I recently decided to continue my series of artwork around the topic of clouds, I thought it would be fitting to create a blog (http://nephelomantia.blogspot.ca/) around that particular art series. The intent of this particular series of painting (I renamed it "Nephelomantia") is to capture some of these ephemeral moments intuitively. Each paintings are unique and the clouds are created without any particular shape in mind. It is only after they are completed that one can see a shape, message or meaning. And the fun part is that the viewer gives it meaning. Different people will have different interpretation and will probably see different thing.
When I looked at these clouds, I saw a question mark. What do you see?
