The Invisible Link

When recasting my web site between 2020 and 2023, I decided to add a preamble to the “Background” chapter devoted to Joni Mitchell's career as well as to the context of the creation of the paintings inspired by her music and our resulting meetings.

I designed this introduction as a sort of visual and allegorical panorama of her studio albums, a symbolic stroll through the musician's extraordinary path and its milestones, from Song to a Seagull to the album Shine.

In May 2024, something quite unusual happened, and in my opinion remarkable enough for it to be worth reporting here. It dealt with the visual that I had retained to evoke the album Clouds, seen on the page that precedes.

In order to evoke that album, there is no need to specify that existed obviously a thousand creative ways to depict clouds.

Of course, apart from its generic title, the poetic descriptions in the so famous and celebrated composition Both Sides, Now (last track of the album) immediately came to mind :  a sublime metaphor of human condition, in which Joni Mitchell describes with her unique insight and in such a touching and shrewd way youth’s naive hope for an ever-lasting sunny life, but which the accumulation of clouds so quickly darkens. Clouds becoming the baneful heralds of chaos which leaves behind our dreams scattered and our loves shattered by the lightning of storms, born from those clouds of misfortune.

The ways of showing clouds were therefore about as infinite as their amount in the sky - which speaks for itself. And yet, when listening to the record and mainly to Both Sides, Now, one immediately stood out : a photo taken during a plane ride to Greece. When traveling, I often point my camera beyond the window, photographing the sky and its inhabitants. The clouds in this picture instantly made me think of these harmless mountains of cozy down, white, immaculate, silky and peaceful.

And at the same time, as Joni Mitchell announced, some of them rose and turned suddenly black, threatening and hostile like the omens of failures and disillusionment to come. Thus as close as possible to the source, reflecting the Clouds album and what its title and its flagship composition Both Sides, Now evoked.

And then in May 2024, through research that I had started on a completely different subject, I came across the Wikipedia page for the composition Both Sides, Now.
I was truly amazed when I discovered its origin, and the context which had inspired Joni Mitchell that song.
Quote : “Mitchell has said that "Both Sides, Now" was inspired by a passage, a 1959 novel by Saul Bellow. “I was reading (...) “Henderson the Rain King“ on a plane and early in the book Henderson (...) is also up in a plane. He's on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did”.

Finding out about such a convergence between the source of inspiration for this so moving parable about clouds, and the nature of the photo that I had chosen to illustrate the latter stroke me greatly. This seemed to me to come under the domain of the “synchronistic event“ as described by Carl Jung.

When I chose this photo taken from my window, aboard this holiday flight from Paris to Athens in 2022, I never suspected that the clouds mentioned by Joni Mitchell in her Clouds album were those seen from a high-altitude plane’s window -the mentioned “feather canyons” floating lazily above the continents. Clouds have been my passion since childhood, and in 2007 I even made a painting on the theme of clouds entitled Nuages - a poetic theme notably shared by Joni Mitchell and Oscar Niemeyer, as their respective writings show.