Entry 003: What Cloud Watching Taught Me About Art

Every weekend for years, we'd make the drive. Two and a half hours from Cape Town to our farm in the Cederberg. I'd start out sitting properly, maybe reading, but eventually I'd end up lying across the back seat or resting against the seatbelt, neck craned up, watching the endless sky scroll past.

While everyone else talked about the Cederberg's iconic rock formations, I was obsessed with the clouds. The way they'd shift and morph above those ancient mountains. A dragon becoming a ship becoming a face becoming nothing at all. Hours of finding shapes in chaos, making meaning from vapor and light.

Twenty-five years later, I'm doing the same thing with ink on paper.

The Birth of Mapping Cloudy Terrain

When I sat down to create what would become "Mapping Cloudy Terrain," I had this vague idea—what would a cloud look like if I tried to capture it in ink? Not its literal form, but its essence. That constant state of becoming.

I started with a single circle. Then another. No plan beyond the memory of those long drives, that child's eye view from the back seat.

At first, it looked like the beginnings of a dragon's face—fitting, since dragons were my go-to cloud shape as a kid. Then as I worked down to what might have been the neck, it began morphing into something else entirely. Something that was neither dragon nor cloud but held the essence of both.

Circle by circle, line by line, it became what it wanted to become.

(This is the part that would have terrified my tech-operations self. No roadmap. No version control. No undo button.)

Learning to See What's Already There

My analytical brain—the one trained by years in systems and spreadsheets—wanted to map everything. Plan everything. Control everything. Real artists, I told myself, have vision. They see the finished piece before they begin. They don't just... make it up as they go.

But those hours of cloud watching had taught me something different, something I'd forgotten in all my years of trying to fit into professional boxes:

The magic was never in controlling what appeared. It was in being present enough to see it.

My mum does this with my work now. She'll stop by my dining room table studio, look at a work in progress, and point to something I hadn't even noticed. "That looks like a womb," she said once, tracing the curves with her finger. And suddenly, there it was. Right there in the intersection of circles I drew while thinking about something else entirely. 

What fascinates me is how she sees something completely different from what I see. Where I might find a landscape, she finds a face. Where I see abstract patterns, she sees animals or flowers or memories from her own life. It's like we're cloud watching together, but looking at ink instead of sky.

Sometimes I lean into these discoveries, define them more. Sometimes I leave them hidden, secrets for those who look long enough. But mostly, I've learned to trust them. To trust that the patterns will emerge. That meaning will find its way through.

The Wisdom of Impermanence

Clouds taught me about letting go before I had language for it. You can't hold onto a cloud shape. The moment you've decided it's definitely a rabbit, the wind shifts and it's becoming something else. You can fight it, insist on still seeing the rabbit, but you'll miss the ship that's forming, the bird that's about to appear.

This is what I'm learning with ink: to hold things lightly. To let each piece become what it needs to become, not what I planned for it to be.

My pieces often start without intention now. I've stopped fighting it. I'll sit down with my archival pens, no plan beyond the first mark, and just... begin. Circle. Line. Another circle. Watching what emerges, what wants to be seen.

The analytical part of me still protests sometimes. It whispers about wasted materials, about inefficiency, about the pieces that don't "work" because the patterns that emerged weren't compelling enough. But the cloud watcher in me—that kid in the back seat—knows better. 

Not every cloud is a dragon. Sometimes they're just clouds. And that's okay too.

Finding Meaning in the Marks

People ask about my "inspiration" and I struggle to explain that sometimes there isn't any. Not in the traditional sense. Sometimes it's just my hand moving and my brain catching up later, finding patterns in what's already there. Like those childhood drives, making sense of chaos, finding stories in the space between intention and accident.

When I look at "Mapping Cloudy Terrain" now, I see so many things:

• The dragon that started it all
• Topographical maps of places I've never been
• Weather patterns forming and dissolving
• The view from a back seat window, years collapsed into ink

Others see different things entirely. And that's exactly right. That's what clouds taught me—reality isn't fixed. The same shapes can be a dragon and a rabbit and a sailing ship all at once, depending on who's looking, depending on the angle, depending on what you need to see that day.

The Practice of Presence

This is what I couldn't learn from tutorials. This is what no amount of planning could have taught me. That sometimes the best discoveries come from letting go of the need to control. From being present enough to see what's already there, waiting to be noticed.

My need-to-know self—the one that color-codes calendars and makes lists of lists—is slowly making peace with this uncertainty. She's learning that not knowing what will emerge is different from not knowing what you're doing. That there's wisdom in the wandering. That sometimes the most profound truths come from simply paying attention to what is, rather than forcing what should be.

Those long drives to the Cederberg gave me hours of practice in finding beauty in the ephemeral. In accepting that nothing stays the same. In discovering that impermanence doesn't make something less meaningful—it makes it more precious.

Every piece I create now carries this lesson. The ink is permanent, yes, but the seeing is always shifting. What you find in the patterns today might be different tomorrow. What speaks to you in morning light might whisper something else at dusk.

The Space Between Control and Chaos

I think about that child in the back seat, how she never got bored on those long drives. How she found endless entertainment in something that was literally nothing—vapor and air and light. How she knew, instinctively, that the stories we tell ourselves about what we see are just as real as what's actually there.

She was practicing something essential, though she didn't know it then. She was learning to be comfortable with uncertainty. To find joy in the unplanned. To trust that patterns would emerge, even if she couldn't predict what they'd be.

This is what I'm returning to now, circle by circle, line by line. Not just making art, but recovering a way of seeing I'd almost lost in all those years of trying to fit into boxes that weren't quite right.

Not every pattern I find is profound. Not every piece tells a story worth sharing. But the practice of looking, of staying curious, of finding meaning in the marks—that's become my meditation. My way back to that child who knew that clouds were never just clouds.

And sometimes, when the light hits just right, when I tilt my head at exactly the angle I used to from that back seat, I can still see them all—the dragons, the ships, the faces. All there in the ink, waiting to be discovered.

To everyone who's been told they need a plan, a vision, a clear path forward: maybe you don't. Maybe you just need to start making marks and trust that the patterns will emerge. Maybe you just need to remember what you knew as a child—that meaning isn't something you impose. It's something you discover.

Because the magic isn't in controlling what appears.

It's in being present enough to see it. In being loose enough to feel through. In holding everything—your art, your plans, your life—lightly enough that it can become what it needs to become.

The clouds taught me that first. The ink is teaching me again. 🖤