to catch a cloud...

Nothing is more comforting and enchanting than looking up at clouds floating in a blue blue sky.

On the other hand, nothing is more peculiar and and enchanting than looking at clouds inside a building!

Living and working in Amsterdam, visual artist Berndnaurt Smilde has discovered a way to create the unimaginable by producing indoor clouds in the middle of rooms by carefully balancing temperature, humidity and lighting.

I remember being transfixed by the ICONOCLOUD images he created for Hapres Bazaar back in 2013. Featuring Alber, Karl, Donatello and D&G with clouds.

He has always been fascinated by the impressive skies, especially those in Old Dutch seascape paintings.

“My grandparents had one with really threatening-looking clouds. I remember I was intrigued by the power of it. I couldn’t really grasp what it was, but there was something big, magical and dark about to happen in that painting, I wanted to create the idea of a typical Dutch rain cloud inside a space.”

The Dutch artist is best known for his “Nimbus” series, in which he creates perfect, fluffy clouds in unique indoor spaces: churches, castles, dungeons. The are as beautiful and as unexpected as they are fleeting.

The only lasting memory of each cloud is a singular photograph—the perfect picture of the cloud in that space, which Smilde and his team work to capture.

At the risk of making you look behind the curtain, basically it involves a very humid room, a smoke machine, and water vapour from a spray bottle. It’s hard to believe that from such unlikely items comes such magic.

As Smilde explains “ the water particles stick to the smoke and they kind of keep together for just a short while.”

It’s long enough for him to capture an image of it…

Make yourself a nice cup of tea, take 10 minutes and listen to him explain in his own words how he creates his clouds…

Queen Marie

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