Derek Macara, Storm Over The Backshore

Oil on linen

24 x 18 inches

Derek Macara’s art is a subtle, evocative meditation on light, atmosphere, and western mythos. Though he’s best known for his luminous cloudscapes, his occasional forays into cowboy imagery bring a quiet tension between sky and earth, freedom and identity.

In his cloud paintings, Macara captures the mutable, luminous drama of weather—vast skies folding and unfolding in rich tones, always with a sense of motion and transience. You feel the light breaking through, the weight of atmosphere, the shifting boundary between dream and horizon. On Instagram he notes that his cloudscapes often begin from photographs, yet the final canvas goes well beyond documentary reference.

When he places cowboys—but often only glimpsed, silhouetted or isolated—into this atmospheric world, they become more symbol than narrative: wanderers in a luminous expanse, negotiating the tensions of solitude, space, and myth. The clouds become their stage, sometimes even their adversary.

What makes Macara’s work deeply compelling is the balance between grandness and restraint: the sky is vast, the clouds dramatic, but the palette is muted, the compositions spare. The result is an art of quiet scale—where light and presence, atmosphere and identity, converse with one another.