Milk and Honey Day 22: The Symbolism of Clouds

I've always loved clouds.

Long before I became an artist, before I ever thought about symbolism, and certainly before I started building a collection called Milk and Honey, I was the person staring out the window watching a storm roll in.

Part of that probably comes from growing up on an island in the Chesapeake Bay. When you're surrounded by water, the sky becomes part of the landscape. Weather doesn't just happen overhead. You can see it coming and keep track of it because shifts in weather mean shifts in life.  Storms roll in from the west and seem to hover over the bay, pulling up moisture and dumping it back down. Clouds stretch across miles of open sky, changing shape, color, and character as they move. Some days the water and sky seem to blend together. Other days the clouds become the entire show.

I used to sit and watch storms move across the bay.

Now my kids do it with me looking out over a lake.

Even now, some of my favorite evenings are the ones where the weather refuses to be boring. Give me towering summer clouds on my back in a pool, dramatic storm fronts with lighting outside a window, or a sunset that turns the entire sky gold and I'll stop my evening walk to watch. There is something about clouds that has never stopped fascinating me. They're constantly changing, impossible to hold onto, and capable of transforming an ordinary landscape into something unforgettable.

That's probably why they keep showing up in my paintings.

If you removed the clouds from most of the landscapes in this collection, the compositions would still work. The wheat fields would still be wheat fields. The rivers would still be rivers. The flowers, waterfalls, and rolling hills would still be there.

But the paintings would lose something important.

They would lose the sense that something is happening.

Clouds bring movement into a landscape. They bring atmosphere. They soften edges, obscure distant things, and create layers that make a scene feel larger than what is immediately visible. They introduce an element of unpredictability. The sky can shift in a matter of minutes, changing the mood of an entire place without moving a single tree or blade of grass.

I've always thought that was part of their beauty.

Most of us prefer certainty. We like knowing where we're headed. We like plans, timelines, and outcomes that make sense. Yet some of the most meaningful parts of life don't work that way. Faith doesn't. Creativity doesn't. Relationships don't. The future certainly doesn't.

We spend a surprising amount of our lives moving toward things we cannot fully see.

Maybe that's why clouds appear so often throughout Scripture.

When the Israelites left Egypt, God led them by a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night. I've always found it interesting that God didn't guide them with a detailed map. He didn't hand them forty years' worth of instructions. He gave them enough direction for the next step and asked them to trust Him with the rest.

The cloud represented His presence, but it also represented mystery. The people knew God was leading them, but they couldn't see the entire journey at once. They still had to follow.

That feels surprisingly familiar.

Most of us would love to know exactly how our stories are going to unfold. We want clarity about the future, certainty about the outcome, and reassurance that everything will work out according to our plans. Instead, we usually get enough light for the next step and an invitation to keep moving.

The more I paint, the more I realize clouds represent that tension for me.

They remind me that not everything needs to be completely visible in order to be real. They remind me that there is beauty in mystery and that wonder often begins where certainty ends. They remind me that life is constantly changing, whether we are ready for it or not.

They also remind me that some of the most spectacular displays of light happen because clouds are present.

A clear sky can be beautiful, but it is often the clouds that catch the color of a sunrise or sunset. They reflect the light, scatter it, soften it, and transform it into something far more dramatic than it would have been otherwise. The very thing that seems to block the light often becomes the thing that reveals it.

I suspect that's one of the reasons they continue to appear throughout this collection.

Milk and Honey is a collection about provision, promise, restoration, and the long journey between where we are and where we hope to be. It is rooted in landscapes because landscapes understand seasons. They understand growth, change, waiting, storms, harvests, and the reality that most things unfold slowly.

Clouds belong in that story.

They remind me that God is still present when the road ahead isn't completely visible. They remind me that mystery is not the same thing as absence. Most of all, they remind me that some of the most beautiful moments in life happen when light meets uncertainty and transforms it into something we never could have created ourselves.

For a collection built around faith, hope, and promise, I can't think of a better symbol than that.