Where There's Smoke:

1970 - Judy Chicago, *Multi-color Atmosphere, from the portfolio “On Fire”*

A Brief History of Smoke and Vapor in Modern Art

Farnsworth Fine Cannabis is a bold and inclusive world, but at our core, we are a smoking brand. The ritual of setting fire to flower is at once a simple act of chemistry and a religious transfiguration. Solid becomes gas; THC achieves its most ephemeral, most spiritual state — billowing improvisations which swirl and dance before fading into the ether.

Through the centuries artists have been obsessed with the depiction of the ephemeral (especially when juxtaposed with the eternal) and few phenomena showcase ephemerality as succinctly as smoke and/or vapor. But there was a way to take a cloud and pin it down ...

Vincent Van Gogh *Wheat Field with Cypresses* (1889) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Water vapor — a.k.a. clouds — have long been a subject represented by paint. In the 1960s vapor itself BECOMES the medium.

Fast-forward to 1960s Southern California where a booming aerospace and missile defense ecosystem prospered in the postwar arms race. A handful of engineers at places like Lockheed, Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA—not to mention a nascent Silicon Valley—were cutting technological edges during the day and hanging out in parking lots with their artist friends during the night. Or as Pacific Standard Time explains, “an opened-minded creative class of scientists, fabricators, and industry professionals were both prevalent and amenable to collaboration." The Light and Space Art Movement was born.

“Clouds,” perhaps couldn’t be pinned, but they could be conjured and manipulated into works of art and in the decades since artists have found all sorts of brilliant ways to do so. Here are some of our favorites: