It happened when the world was asked to stand still. I had the time to stand on my balcony and look up. The sky above Calgary kept moving: clouds forming and dissolving, light cutting through in ways I'd never stopped to notice before. I found something in it. Refuge, mostly. And then I couldn't stop looking, searching, and discovering. What I kept finding up there was awe. Not every day, but often enough. A moment when the light would catch a cloud formation in a way that stopped me completely. Something that felt like a painting handed down from above, existing for a few minutes before the wind moved it on. Those moments filled me up. They still do. One compelling sky can hold me for another day.
I've been chasing that feeling ever since. I pull over on highways. I find high ground. I bought a condo up in the sky. I watch the forecast and wait for the conditions that tell me something is about to happen up there. Alberta is known for its big skies: warm winds rolling off the Rockies, Chinook arches, weather systems that move fast and dramatic across the prairie. I feel lucky to live here. I feel lucky to look up. The Sky Study is what came from this obsession. Capsule collections of images, each collection built around a theme. A mood, a colour, a feeling in the sky. I use a telephoto lens to get in close, to find the painting inside the vast. My intention is simple: to quiet myself, capture the awe I feel in that moment, and share it. To give someone else the chance to live with that feeling each day. The collections are named in French. A language I feel more than I speak. Familiar and foreign at once, something I am still finding. Like the light. I don't have a grand philosophy. I am just someone who looks up, finds beauty in what most people drive past, and wants to share what I see.
Cloudobsessed.
Bibliotheca
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”
Some skies demand to be studied. These are formations of such density and complexity they feel archived: cloud systems layered like texts, heavy with meaning, asking for slow attention. And then: a single beam, cutting through. Purposeful. Directed. As if someone had aimed it. It finds one point in the darkness below and holds it, briefly, before the sky shifts and seals itself again. That formation will never return. That light will never fall the same way twice. Bibliotheca asks you to look carefully, find the light, and begin there.
L’Océana
“A moment with self is the strongest bond that carries us through to the end.”
There is a particular blue-grey that lives exactly between storm and silver, between surface and abyss. L’Océana holds you there in the depths, suspended, enveloped, isolated in the way that feels closer to safe than alone. These skies are seen through a lens layered between ocean and cloud, two infinities pressing gently toward each other. One breath underwater and you could pass between them. The deep below. The vast above. Something awaiting in both.
Voile
“Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.”
A veil does not hide. It transforms. These sunsets are immense, saturated, the sky pulling colour to its outermost reach. And yet Voile draws your eye to the small glimpse: a fragment of gossamer cloud, lit from within, shifting in the space between concealment and revelation. Texture you could almost touch. Light you could almost hold. A blanket drawn gently over the earth before dark. Above us, the sky moves the way all living things move: with rhythm, with intention, with a grace that requires no audience but deserves to be commemorated.
Prélude
“Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.”
Colours that have not yet decided what they will become. Skies caught in the breath before the weather exhales. Prélude lives entirely inside the moment of symphony, the orchestra awaiting the next note. The approach, it turns out, is always more powerful than the arrival.
Sable
“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
Sand and black. Two meanings carried in one word, both true at once. These skies hold that same duality: the mineral warmth of a desert horizon, clouds the colour and weight of dunes moving across a landscape that has forgotten rain. Something has just happened here, or is about to. The air carries that specific stillness that follows violence or precedes it. Ancient and indifferent. Beautiful the way dangerous things are beautiful. Completely, and without apology.
D’Atlas
“Nature does nothing in vain.”
These clouds did not form: they were built. Rising in ancient memory of marble columns, shelter to shade the earth and bring balance. To bear the sky is not a burden. It is a purpose. D’Atlas carries it all: the weight, the shadow, the slow accumulation of something enormous going quietly about its work. Standing beneath them you feel it. That specific smallness, that acceptance. The gentle giant, present and purposeful, generous by nature.
Vantage
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
The horizon is not a line. It is an entrance. These skies hold the earth’s own reflection: coastlines, burning plains, mountain ranges built entirely from cloud and light, distantly familiar, a landscape seen before, from a different angle, in a different life. Vantage is standing at the threshold, observing the divide, wondering what lies on the other side and beyond. We observe. We long. We wonder.
