6 skyscape paintings we are completely loving this week
At Arts to Hearts Project, art has never been just one thing. Every subject, every medium, and every way an artist chooses to look at the world deserves its moment. We have explored portraits, food, florals, seascapes, animals, and so much more. This week, we are turning our attention upward and bringing you some of our favourite skyscape paintings.
The sky has been painted for centuries. Turner built an entire career around it. The Impressionists were obsessed with it, fascinated by changing light, weather, and atmosphere. And still, artists around the world continue to find new ways of painting it through different moods, perspectives, colours, and experiences.
. The sky is one of the hardest things to paint well. It looks simple from a distance and reveals itself as endlessly complex the moment you try to capture it. The best sky painters are not painting clouds or sunsets they are painting atmosphere, mood, that specific feeling of being small underneath something enormous and finding it beautiful rather than frightening.
This week we are sharing our favourite skyscape paintings, the ones that made us stop, look up from whatever we were doing, and just breathe for a second. This is our heart list for this week.
01. Last Sun Behind Sheer Curtain by Shawn Huckins @shawn_huckins
First on our heart list this week is Last Sun Behind Sheer Curtain by Shawn Huckins and the curtain is what gets you. Because without it, this is a beautiful sunset painting. With it, it becomes something else entirely.
A dramatic cloud formation lit up in deep orange and gold, seen through sheer fabric that softens and filters the whole scene pulling the sky back just enough to make it feel both close and slightly out of reach at the same time. That one decision changes everything about how you experience this painting.
Shawn is a New Hampshire based painter born in 1984 whose work sits between beauty and commentary using landscape, light and everyday American imagery to say something about culture, climate and identity. Shawn paints the world he lives in American landscapes, domestic interiors, everyday light but always with this undercurrent of something more critical running through it. Climate, culture, identity. This painting looks like a sunset and feels like a question.
Go follow him and dig into his wider practice there is a lot more going on beneath the surface than a beautiful sky.
02. Theater of Light by Kathleen B. Hudson @kathleenbhudson
This week’s second pick is Theater of Light by Kathleen B. Hudson, 30 by 48 inches of oil and every single one of them earned. A vast cloudscape fills the entire canvas, enormous cumulus clouds lit up from behind in deep gold and amber, the landscape below sitting dark and low, almost an afterthought beneath all that drama happening above.
This is a sky that takes up all the room and absolutely deserves to. Kathleen is a Colorado Springs based oil painter who works both in studio and en plein air, and her whole practice is built around light and how it moves through a landscape. She described this piece as wanting to communicate something about the expansiveness of where she lives and its big skies and that intention is completely visible in every inch of this painting.
Kathleen also teaches; with an instructional video series and workshops focused on scaling up paintings and building atmospheric landscapes which makes complete sense when you see work like this.
Give her a follow and keep an eye on what comes next her solo show is going to be worth watching.
03. Santa Fe Nocturne by Jake Trujillo @jaketrujilloart
Santa Fe Nocturne Series 4, No.4 by Jake Trujillo is our third pick this week, and it is the one on this list that does not look like any other sky painting we have ever seen. A deep violet and purple sky, dramatic clouds lit up in electric red and pink, a crescent moon hanging quietly at the top, and the city of Santa Fe glowing faintly in the darkness below.
Where most sky painters chase the light, Jake paints what happens after it leaves and the result is something genuinely unlike anything else. Jake is a Santa Fe born and raised artist and musician whose work blends traditional landscape techniques with abstraction and psychedelia, and that combination is exactly what you are looking at here.
What Jake does with colour in this series is not something you arrive at quickly. These are skies painted by someone who has been watching them his whole life and finally found the exact language to describe what they actually look like at night.
Give him a follow his whole body of work is worth getting lost in.
04. Into the Unknown by Adam Thomas @artistadamjt
This cloud painting by Adam Thomas ‘Into the Unknown’ is our fourth pick this week, and it is the kind of painting that makes you feel the weather. A towering cumulus cloud rises against a deep stormy sky, lit from within in brilliant white, with just a sliver of calm blue water visible at the bottom of the canvas.
The contrast between that churning, monumental cloud and the stillness below is what makes the whole thing work. Adam is a Chicago based painter born in Battle Creek, Michigan, who trained at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit before spending a decade in corporate marketing and when he finally committed to painting full time, he brought that same focused energy to his work.
He is best known for three distinct series: abstract works in oil and wax, birds painted on vintage sheet music, and black and white clouds of which this piece is a stunning example. His whole practice is built around dramatic lighting and how light affects the world at different times of day, and this painting makes that completely clear.
Give him a follow and see the full range of what he makes every series on his page is worth exploring.
05. The Passing by Monique Jackett @monique_j_art
The Passing by Monique Jackett is our fifth pick this week and this one is all mood. Deep, layered blues filling the entire canvas, a storm system moving across the sky in dark dramatic sweeps, a thin strip of lighter horizon sitting quietly at the bottom as if reminding you that it will pass. Rich and brooding and completely immersive.
Monique is a New Zealand based mixed media artist from Napier who works in oil, resin and mixed media, creating what she describes as inspired, surreal landscapes. Her practice is built around atmosphere and emotion skies that feel like a state of mind rather than a weather report and The Passing is a perfect example of that.
The piece was available at Art for Alex this weekend in Napier. Every painting on her page carries this same quality of stillness inside movement, calm inside drama the feeling that whatever is passing, something steadier is waiting on the other side.
Give her a follow and see everything she has been making her whole body of work has this same depth to it.
06. Blue Skies by Brooklyn Whelan @brooklynwhelan
Number six on our heart list this week is Blue Skies by Brooklyn Whelan, and the title is pure irony. This is not a blue-sky painting in any conventional sense. A massive explosion of dark smoke billows upward against a thin strip of actual blue sky, fire burning at the centre in deep orange and red, the whole thing painted in oil with the kind of bold, muscular brushwork that makes it feel like the canvas is still moving. It is dramatic and unsettling and completely impossible to look away from.
Brooklyn was born in Sydney in 1976 and has spent two decades building a practice entirely around the sky not the postcard version, but the charged, shifting, sometimes violent kind. His grandfather taught him to read the weather, to watch pressure systems build and move, and that deep familiarity with the sky as something alive and unpredictable runs through every painting he makes.
His graffiti background gives his work an immediacy and structural boldness that separates it from traditional landscape painting entirely. He has collaborated with Adidas, Samsung, Universal Records and Bergdorf Goodman, created the typeface for Justin Bieber’s single and was the first artist in residence at Splendour in the Grass. His work hangs in collections across New York, London and Hong Kong.
Give him a follow his feed is unlike anything else out there.
Six paintings of the sky this week and not one of them looked like the others. That is the whole point. Go find these artists and show them some love. Follo w them, share their work, leave a comment that goes beyond an emoji. They painted something worth stopping for.
And if you are an artist, Arts to Hearts Magazine Issue 14: The Summer We Remember is open right now. Thirteen editions in, over 1,000 artists featured, internationally distributed through Barnes & Noble and Amazon and read by collectors, curators and galleries worldwide.
The theme is yours to interpret however feels true a memory, a place, an emotion, a season that changed something. All mediums, all disciplines, all backgrounds welcome. Submissions close August 2nd, 2026. There is a $500 cash prize for selected artists, and we would genuinely love to see your work in this one.
