When I found out that I was going to be a dad, I painted the sky. That morning there were currents of purple clouds lined with crimson.

The day my son was born I held him and watched the sunrise from the hospital windows, seven floors up. It was a cloudy morning with glimpses of brightness along the horizon below. The next day we brought him home through flurries of snowflakes, and over the following sleepless months I marked time mainly by the shifting colors of the sky. At night what had before seemed mere darkness became the deep purple of nighttime diaper changes, the warm black of midnight feedings, and the hesitant blue of near dawn laps through the house with my crying baby as we paused at each window to see the coming warmth of daybreak. 

By the time my son was old enough for me to start working again in my studio, my grandfather’s health was quickly declining. The day my grandfather went into hospice I drove to the mountains and painted in thick fog. The day he died the sky surged with bright clouds. 

The sky took over my paintings. I painted its glowing violet, yellow and green through forest trunks and thought of stained glass windows in the quiet reverence of a cathedral. I painted its vibrant gradations covered in birds that to me were prayers, messengers between earth and heaven. I painted color after color of sky in a habit of casting my emotions onto the world around me, turning these compositions into places where my inner and outer worlds could meet.