“Imagine: big blue mountains and red clouds wandering high up there. I felt like that’s the place where the Gods could reside,” writes Konrad Mägi from Norway. Mägi had never seen mountains before, at least not such ones. For some reason, a powerful experience of nature was associated with gods and a sacred dimension for him, which he further amplified in his painting with those clouds. It is here in Norway that Mägi starts noticing clouds, expressing through them some kind of drama that can be sensed within himself, in nature, or elsewhere. The clouds are not calm tufts in the sky but dynamic, tense, magnificent.

And yet. According to cloud scientists, these are not Norwegian clouds. Such cumulus clouds do not form in mountainous regions. Yes, the landscape depicts Norway, but the clouds are actually from Estonia. By the time this painting was created, Mägi had been away from Estonia for six years. Why does he return to these clouds from his childhood? Is it because cumulus clouds are more dramatic than the cloud banks typical of Norwegian mountainous regions and thus help to better highlight the theatrical sacredness that interested Mägi? Or do the clouds, once seen in Estonia, enhance the landscape compositionally better? Or did he want to return to his home milieu for a while, to a familiar and safe place that instilled peace, stability and nostalgic longing in the middle of a foreign Norway?

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