Renie Spoelstra’s series Through the Clouds transports viewers into landscapes infused with both beauty and melancholy, capturing moments of natural grace within charcoal’s elusive medium. For the past 25 years, Spoelstra has traversed diverse environments, from the Dutch lowlands to the Andean highlands, creating charcoal drawings inspired by film, music, and her emotional responses to place. Her works are shaped by an ongoing search for the “soul” of a landscape, often under brooding, cloud-covered skies where only occasional glimpses of sunlight penetrate. These landscapes, with their dramatic contrasts of light and dark, serve as portals to existential contemplation, offering the viewer an experience of beauty coupled with awareness of life’s fragility.

Spoelstra’s artistic process is labor-intensive, layering charcoal onto paper to capture fleeting elements such as shadows, fog, and reflections. These features reflect both the chaos of nature and her own emotional responses, each layer becoming a piece of the whole. The quiet intensity of her work speaks to a delicate balance between permanence and ephemerality, hinting at her personal experiences of loss and resilience. The resulting images, still yet full of implied movement, become poignant reminders of life’s transient nature.

Through Through the Clouds, Spoelstra invites us to immerse ourselves in the landscapes that hold both beauty and sorrow, a reminder of our own fleeting presence in the natural cycle. Her charcoal drawings reveal the inherent contradictions in nature, capturing a tension between what is seen and what is felt, ultimately creating a hauntingly beautiful meditation on life, memory, and place.