Picturing Places and Spaces

Gray Series, No. 16 captures the power of nature through a formation of ominous clouds that fill this large painting. The vantage point is not clear—perhaps from a high hill or from the pilot's seat in a small plane. The gray clouds have a bright white patch at the center which may indicate the weather is changing before our eyes. Along the lower edge, the golden-orange haze offers hope the weather may be clearing.

Donald Cronkhite received his BFA from Wayne State University, and he has been exhibiting his work in solo and group exhibitions since 2003. He is best known for paintings of cloudscapes, but he also paints landscapes and architecture. Cronkhite's fascination with clouds began when he studied a Dutch painting in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Jacob van Ruisdael's The Jewish Cemetery. Ruisdael's painting is unusually large (56 x 75 ½) for a seventeenth-century painting, and it features realistic storm clouds with a patch of light bursting through the darkness and a rainbow beginning to appear. The stormy sky occupies the upper right corner, and below Ruisdael depicts the scene of a cemetery and the ruins of a church. In contrast, Cronkhite just focuses on the sky in the painting in the Stamelos Collection. On his website, he explains his goal is "to capture the excitement and drama of experiencing moments in nature."