Georgia O'Keeffe

Painted late in her career when she was experimenting with unconventional viewpoints, Sky with Flat White Cloud is the second in a series of seven paintings in which Georgia O’Keeffe took inspiration from flying in an airplane high above the earth’s surface, observing the surrounding atmosphere and cloud formations. Excited by the experience of air travel, she remarked, “I’ve often thought how wonderful it would be to simply stand out in space and have nothing!”

In this painting and two others in the group, she divided the vista into three horizontal bands; the largest represents the solid cloudbank, which is surmounted by a narrow band of yellowish haze (possibly inspired by the airplane’s contrail) and the blue atmosphere above. In the other paintings, she represented the clouds as “little oval white clouds, all more or less alike,” as they appear in her last undertaking of the series, the monumental twenty-four-foot-long Sky Above Clouds IV (1965, Art Institute of Chicago).