NOTES FROM THE PLANE: THE CLOUD CHASER

There are certain sights that always bring me back to myself. For me, they are clouds.

Whenever I travel by plane and sit by the window, I feel as if, for a brief moment, I am moving away from everything familiar and drawing closer to something much greater — to God, to creation, to the creative Source from which everything begins. Up there, above the earth, above the noise, obligations, everyday restraints, human chaos and unrest, the sky looks to me like a place where the world is being born again.

I love that brief instant when the plane parts from the earth — the only loss of control that does not frighten me. On the contrary, it makes me happy. Like a child waiting for the most exciting ride at an amusement park, I anticipate the moment when it leaves the runway and enters the space it was created for. Then it seems to me that we, too, sleepy passengers, worried and tired for so many reasons, become free for a little while, each of us from whatever we left down below.

In those moments, I feel closest to something I cannot fully explain, yet recognize with my whole being. As if there, among the clouds, deep nostalgia and peace meet, the forgetting of everything and the finding of the most important fragment of who we essentially are —childlike joy and profound faith.

Clouds are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me — like threads of some elusive being, electric movements of heavenly sea currents, foamy little cakes, blue dragons, snow avalanches, an entrance into the mysterious chambers of paradise’s antechambers. Sometimes they seem like translucent foam I could scoop up with a giant spoon, and sometimes like the threshold of something sacred — a place where, perhaps, those who are no longer with us reside.

My love for them is not tied to that perfectly painted sky; it is, in fact, a love for the elusive, the ever-changing, the unreachable, and the infinitely close. For everything that cannot be kept, but can be felt. Toward forms that disappear in the blink of an eye; toward that eternally changing, most authentic performance, leaving a trace deeper than many things we touch with our hands.

That is why I photograph them, that is why I paint them. Not because photography can fully capture their magnificence —as it cannot. Art is undoubtedly more powerful in that way. But I photograph them to preserve a trace of the moment, of light, of wonder. So that later, perhaps on canvas, I might try to translate what I saw and what I felt.

Especially when I find in them shapes that may seem invisible to others; when I connect a few dots and, suddenly, before the viewer, an entire world of clouds emerges — a world previously unseen, a world that is constantly being born and disappearing. Sometimes I feel as though I am an interpreter of that sky, its tiny translator; as though I have been given the ability to recognize beings, landscapes, signs, and stories in those ever-changing forms, and to bring them, if only for a moment, closer to others.

Sometimes all it takes is a little attention, a little patience, a few guided glances — and what was once only a cloud becomes a dragon breathing fire, an eye watching me, a face that seems familiar, a flaming shell revealing its pearl, a Scorpio constellation, boat in a shipwreck...a map of some invisible world.

And then I know: someone must record what disappears and what remains unnoticed.

Those who look up and see an entire world in a puddle, a cloud, a puddle, a drop of ink or paint — those are my people. How I love those who feel awe and enchantment when they look at the sky; those who adore its magnificence and never, truly never, grow tired of those eternally changing little circles of paradise. They must be my people. How I love such souls — the ones who simply have to stop before sights that, even if only for a few minutes, reveal the omnipotence of the Creator.

A sky full of clouds is my object of devotion, my subject, my reminder that beauty exists — especially when we cannot possess it. That creation begins with wonder. And that sometimes, high above the earth, the quiet place within us that still believes, that still dreams, can be heard most clearly.

Until the next flight — until the next cloud.