Cloud Cave

'Cloud Cave,' Monochromatic Urban Landscape, by Marc Barker, Oil on Panel Painting

This oil painting features the skyline of an urban landscape with predominant sky and one cloud with a reflection of the cloud in the foreground. The colors are primarily greys and sepia tones utilizing an old world grisaille style. The painting is from the artist's series 'The Illusion of Mattering.'
The artist's concerns about the impact of pollution on the future of our natural and built environments is the primary theme of the painting. Pollution in the air is seen drifting towards the future destroying the cities creating boxes instead of architecture.

The painting is not framed and does not require one.

"Observing clouds is one of my instant and personal connections to the timeless, the infinite. And with veils of paint, I invent cloudscapes in oil grisaille where I try to suggest that sublime feeling. Their connection to water and to waves is a flowing quality of the transformative energy that these etheric forms have to not only attract, but to convert into liquid. I use this cinematic quality literally when I work, because I feel I am complete with a piece when the whole mass of energy moves, swells and flows on the paper or canvas. That flow moves me, like when I am motionless, emotionally arrested, and tearfully full of wonder at prismatic sunsets, a sky-filled spring day, or sighting an impermanent, single, small cloud on a hot August afternoon."-- Marc Barker

Marc Barker has over 35 years experience in the arts and over 25 years experience teaching and producing in the field of interactive media. He managed Paseo Intaglio Printers in the late 1980s and continued into the 90s with editioning and contract printing for local and national artists. He was selected as 2004 Festival of the Arts juror for the Arts Council of Oklahoma City and guest juror for the 2009 Paseo Festival of the Arts, and the 2019 Goddard Center 47th Annual Competition. Marc's work has been exhibited in the State Capitol of Oklahoma’s East Gallery with a painting chosen for the permanent collection of the Oklahoma State Art Collection at the State Capitol.