The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

If you're outside, look up. If you're inside, look out the window, and up. What do you see?

Sky, hopefully. And probably, somewhere, clouds. Poofy or wispy, blazing white or thundering grey, here and there or blanketing the air, clouds are so ubiquitous that we frequently forget they're there. Artworks in the sky, clouds shift and change their shape in a moment, never staying long in one place.

They're fascinating.

"I find myself easily distracted now when I see clouds," says Walla Walla watercolor painter Joyce Anderson, who recently completed painting a visual study of clouds, incorporating a cornucopia of their colors and forms.

"Each one of this series of cloudscapes captures a place, a time of day, a location, and most of all a memory of the atmosphere swirling around me," Anderson continues, explaining that she and husband Roy experienced all sorts of weather – and clouds – during a recent trip through Idaho and Wyoming. Huddled in their tent trailer during "torrential, drumbeat, wind-shaking storms," the couple emerged afterward into glorious display of cloud and sky color, which Joyce later translated into dramatic paintings now on display at Wenaha Gallery through August 25.

"I look at weather differently now because of the subject I chose to paint," she says.

Clouds: they're not all the same, and they don't stay the same. To see their variety and beauty as paintings, visit the gallery, located at 219 East Main, Dayton, from Monday through Saturday, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.