In her latest series, Cloud Pictures, Jane Bastion turns her attention to the sky — or more precisely, to the way the human eye, aided by the human imagination, constructs the sky out of shapes. These digital drawings, composed of pure white forms adrift on unfaltering blue grounds, present an almost deflationary take on that most protean of subjects: the cloud. The works, each resolutely minimal in construction, are devoid of atmospheric gradients, meteorological complexity, or painterly gesture. Instead, Bastion offers distilled silhouettes, as if clouds had been remembered from a children’s picture book rather than observed in nature.
At first encounter, the series may appear slight — mere white against blue. Yet the apparent simplicity belies a quietly rigorous formal investigation. Bastion’s clouds do not dissolve into nuance; they are cut, as it were, from the sky with the certainty of a paper silhouette. In this way they resist the transient, changeable character for which clouds are proverbially famous. The effect is almost Platonic: these are the archetypes of clouds, freed from time, season, or weather.
The digital medium is central to this transformation. By abandoning the tonal range and softness of traditional sky painting, Bastion asserts the inherent flatness of the screen-based image. Her skies are less meteorological reports than chromatic fields; the clouds less atmospheric condensations than pure symbols. In their very refusal to yield to naturalism, they invite questions about how much of what we “see” in the world is a function of cultural shorthand.
One might read these works as quietly ironic: in an age of high-resolution satellite imagery and algorithmically generated weather animations, Bastion returns to an almost archaic iconography — the cloud as pictogram. In doing so, she creates a space for contemplation. By stripping away the shifting complexities of real weather, she gives us room to notice our own tendency to anthropomorphize and romanticize the sky.
Cloud Pictures is, in the end, less about clouds themselves than about the language we use — visual, cultural, emotional — to contain them. In these white-on-blue panels, Bastion reminds us that the sky we look at is always already the sky we imagine.
