I am enticed by the idea of being surrounded by microscopic life and systems of energy that I cannot see yet make up the fabric of my reality. "Cloud Inquiry" is a series of oil paintings about the energetic invisible world underlying the visible world around us. The images are designed digitally, working from photos I take without a viewfinder, holding the camera randomly in the grass, trying to capture a grasshopper or ant's point of view of looking up through weeds, plants and trees into the sky. I spend many hours cropping small segments and manipulating the photographs on my computer until I find the composition I want to paint. The paintings are oil on canvas or wood panel with some include cold wax encaustic. The ant-view perspective implies a sense of reverence for the enormity and complexity of the surrounding world and the images in the paintings evoke a sense of psychedelic or rapturous experience and reference scientific means of inquiry like electron microscope photographs and PET scans. They also recall the memory of lying in the grass as a small child watching the clouds move.