Eric Sloane’s first and most enduring artistic love was with the sky. By the late 1920s, the artist made his way back east from Taos and was haunting Roosevelt Field in Long Island, NY...Sloane traded his lettering and paintings of aircraft to the pilots who flew them in exchange for rides. A chance encounter and subsequent friendship with famous aviator Wiley Post was a catalyst for Eric’s change in his artistic focus.

...it was Wiley Post who told him during a flight that ‘Someday, an artist will come along and paint just clouds and sky.’ Sloane decided to become that artist and took to painting cloudscapes. He was entranced by the incredible heights reached by the summits of thunderheads and the exquisite colours found only in the sky.

His first complete cloudscape, a dark and foreboding rendition of a violent thunderhead, was hung for sale at the Roosevelt Field Inn. Sloane secretly feared that no one would purchase such a large view so few had ever witnessed, so he placed a price tag on it that he considered an ‘outlandish’ sum. He reasoned that, if the painting failed to sell, it would be because of price, not lack of quality. The painting was bought by the trailblazing aviator Amelia Earhart, who was very much familiar with such a view of clouds.

https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/wednesday-16th-april-2025/