Saturday, September 10th

Well, after a long day this little night cloud was the best I could eke out. Against a uniformly overcast night sky with ambient light from the city, this lone cloud rode a small breeze northward. This sad little cloud was painted about 10:30 pm facing west.

My attempt at the vast night sky

In my last entry, I mentioned the challenge of using watercolor to portray the deep night sky. So last night I went out on the back porch to search the vast sky for color and composition. I was presented with a lovely view of the planet Saturn on the left with the bright star Arcturus in the middle and the Canes venatici stars, Alkaid, Mizar and Alioth on the right. A lovely night indeed!


It was a lot of fun to put down all these washes of color--glaze over glaze of dark blues, violets and blacks. Because so many people still have no electric power due to the hurricane, the ambient light is lower than usual. This is a painting of the western sky about 10 pm looking toward and above downtown Richmond where it is usually much brighter along the horizon.

Night sky

The night sky is difficult to capture in watercolor. That sense of vast, infinite darkness above seems to have nothing in common with a medium created to reflect light and sparkle. The challenge pushes the medium to abstraction as shown in this little painting done about 9:30 pm facing west last night.


Broken clouds drifting across space, planets twinkling in darkness, dark beauty of the night sky. I'm sure the 400,000 people without power aren't appreciative.

Irene part 1

Early this morning, before dawn, the first threads of clouds from this massive hurricane curled over central Virginia. These clouds were glowing whitely in the night sky. The clouds have no shadows because there is no sun I suppose. It makes the cloud color and movement seem unearthly which, of course, it is.


The sky was a river of blue-black ink with the white clouds swirling through it. I've seen clouds at night glowing with colors of pink and orange. I wonder where the color comes from if there is no sun. I painted clouds from hurricane Bertha once that looked like little pink cakes on a dark blue tray moving quickly through the sky. We will see what else Irene has to offer once she has passed through Virginia. Right now we have lots of rain.