What is attractive about painting a seascape with clouds is that you can paint it in a more expressive way without fear of loosing accuracy as you might with a cityscape you know well. It also makes the issue of the horizon line important to deal with. This strong, even overpowering compositional element, is found in most subject matter including landscape in general and still life (usually the table). It's not that we don't want it there but more like we don't always want it to dominate the composition.
I these two examples by Gabriele Munter you can see that there are many forms that make up the jigsaw composition of the painting.
When choosing your image to bring in, try to visualise it as a painting. Will it be broken up into big blocks of expressive colour, like in the first example, or will it have a more impressionist type development where visual texture is built up bit by bit over the whole image, like in the lower example?
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