Michael Arthur Jayme is a fifth-generation Sonoran Desert dweller who has spent most of his life looking at the cloudless skies of the arid Southwest. But step inside his spacious studio/gallery at the Amado Territory Ranch in Tubac and you'll meet a man with a passion and see emotion-packed landscape paintings with cloud-filled skies.

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There are fluffy, white, billowing mountains of clouds that make you want to spread your arms and fly; ominous dark clouds filled with pending wind and rain; wispy, sunny-day clouds that beckon hammock naps; and angry clouds, busting with rain pouring down in sheets during a desert monsoon.

“I have been painting clouds for many, many years,” said Jayme. “They are the harbingers of rain to come. The rain is a gift and it's very special in the desert.”

Jayme was best known as a Plein Air landscape painter, but now prefers to put paint on canvas in his airy studio, affectionately referred to as his “temple.” He said that he paints landscapes from photographs and his memories, and adds whatever sky and clouds fit his feelings at the moment.

His work has evolved from realism to abstract over the years.

“I'm painting very large now and I'm not interested in schlepping canvas out into the desert at this time,” he said. “Working in the studio allows me to be closer to my paintings so that I can bend and curve the stubborn lines and paint the mountains and clouds as I know them.”

It has been almost 20 years since Jayme switched from applying paints with a brush to buttering, scraping and dabbing his oil paints on canvas with palette knives. Brushes, he said, made him uneasy and he felt like the paint was being scrubbed on the canvas. Palette knives, which resemble very flexible butter knifes, allow him more spontaneity, he said.

While palette knives are his preferred tool for painting Jayme often lays out his work with large brushes giving him “a map to navigate through the space” of the large 4-foot-by-four-foot canvases, he explained. Once the mountains, trees and expansive clouds are in place, he switches to palette knives spreading the oil paint across the canvas. Painting, he said, is like music. Rhythms develop as you apply the gooey paint. As those rhythms develop, his body falls into a natural tempo with high and low notes, he explained.

“When I start squeezing the paint onto the palette I'm already feeling the essence of the final painting,” said Jayme. ”I'm just the vehicle to put it down on canvas.”

Jayme said that his paintings reflect the essence, variety and strength of his native Southwest. He does not name his paintings but numbers them by series because he has no idea how many cloud-filled landscapes he will create before he moves to a new subject. The “Gift” series are of clouds as the rain inside them builds. The “Rain” series shows clouds bursting with falling moisture. Five small paintings that honor his favorite bird, Raven, will be Jayme's first wildlife paintings since he was a child, he said.

Jayme can't remember when he didn't make art, paint and love clouds. As a youngster he would sit on his bed with a child-size easel in front of him and paint the day away, he said. At 15, he coerced his parents into giving up part of the front porch of their Tucson home so he could set up his first painting studio.

He is a self-taught painter and has taken only one painting workshop. “I knew my path as a creative being from my earliest memories,” he said. “I knew I had to honor those feelings and it has been an incredible journey.”

Jayme enjoyed his first one-man show in 1982 at age 24. Since then his work is prized by private collectors and is included in the corporate collections of Coldwell Banker, National Bank of Tucson, First American Federal Bank and others. He has shown his paintings at some prestigious galleries but he exhibits exclusively at his Amado gallery.

Jayme is reserved when it comes to talking about his paintings. “I'm not try to say anything to anybody with my work,” said Jayme. “I'm painting because I'm an artist and I was born this way. I'm a painter and that's the bottom line.”

Jayme and about 40 other artists, including Nogales painter Daniel Guerrero, will open their studios and share their art during an open studio tour, “Hidden Treasures of Santa Cruz Valley”, on the weekends of April 18-19 and 25-26. Coordinated by the Tubac Center of the Arts, the tour will include artists from Green Valley to Sonoita and points in between. On Saturday, April 25, Native American flute player Carlos Nikai will perform at the Michael Arthur Jayme Gallery from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, visit www.tubacartcenter.org.