“It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment." — John Constable. As a child, I have countless memories of staring out the window on long drives from NY to Maine, where my family vacationed in the summertime. My gaze was always directed up at the large expanse of sky, tracing the lines of clouds and the horizon line on my tongue. Patterns emerged, and thinking flowed in a kind of power that charged my entire being. This sky/pattern gazing continued throughout my life, on bus rides, train rides, up in airplanes, studying the sky as a kind of messenger with visions to relay back to me about my own histories and futures. Future Skying is a collection of photographs snapped on my iPhone from the last decade of my travels—pictures of skies from within The States and in Europe, pictures of the sky in different seasons, of my own city block, pics snapped from car windows, pics taken while walking. These pictures stayed dormant on my camera roll for some years until a few months ago when I got the idea to use Stable Diffusion to build on these photos with prompts to create subtly fantastical versions of my skies. Whenever I look at the sky, it is not just the sky I see. I am looking at the sky with my projections, my magical spells, my imagination. But the camera’s eye on my iPhone could not capture my imagination alongside the image of the sky captured. With artificial intelligence, I had the opportunity to attempt a more authentic version of my skies. In this case, using AI actually brings us closer to the real. The title Future Skying is also a nod to landscape painter John Constable’s series known as Skying, in which the sky is his main subject. Sometimes there is no land at all and only sky, sometimes the sky is acting as the chief focal point above a tiny sliver of land. Constable was not shy about his passion for the sky. Without the sky, no light could pass through and shine down on our subjects. No tree, no street corner, no person could be perceived without light. We need it all, of course, but the sky holds an important role in making any landscape composition come together. And of course, the sky itself as a subject is worthy in its own right.
