Blue skies are bandied about in song lyrics from artists such as Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, and Electric Light Orchestra. They’re the subject of small talk on a cloudless, sun-drenched Sonoma County afternoon.
And then you meet Healdsburg artist Christopher Leith Evans, and realize how inadequate the word “blue” is for describing something as expansive and ever-changing as the sky.
“I’ve spent a lifetime contemplating the color of the sky,” says Evans, who begins each of his light-filled landscape oil paintings with the sky itself. “It gives you a sense of the lighting. Getting that right and getting that smooth is always a challenge.”…