Perfect fall day

Friday, November 4th was a perfect fall day with gentle breezes and orange and gold falling leaves. Rain came in the night and dawn was overcast. The afternoon sky was a clear cerulean blue deepening to ultramarine in the higher atmosphere. Small puffy clouds were blown south into the sunshine at 4 pm. They were lovely to watch, a fragile parade.


The clouds were between me and the sun and so the shadows were strong on each of these insubstantial fluffs. Apparently having a shadow is characteristic of altocumulus clouds which makes them easy to distinguish from high-atmosphere cirrocumulus clouds.


Art historian Kurt Badt, in The Cloud Studies of John Constable, proposes two perspectives to view Constable's cloud studies:

One can look at these cloud studies in two very different ways. One can observe their faithfulness to nature and their accuracy; (although that is not their most striking quality, it would be hard to find anything to equal them elsewhere in paintings of the atmosphere). Or one can approach them as pictures (albeit of strange subjects), as compositions, and then one will become aware of the intellectual element in them, or the 'poetic' element, to use the terminology of the Romantics.

In all the sky, an artist selects the compositions from the expanse before her. The challenge of creating a three-dimensional world on paper or canvas is great.