02/26/12, 6:30 pm, looking north west

Perfectly clear, cool and sunny--a lovely late winter day. With a low of 25 degrees F and a high of 45, the day felt appropriately cool. There were no clouds during the day, just a few thin cumulus left over from the previous day's excitement.


The sunset was a most vibrant play of light in the crisp air so I used Caran d'Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle watercolor crayons for an explosion of pigment.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud"

Okay, it is true that this poem is really about daffodils which currently slumber underground in Virginia gaining strength for next spring's display. But the first line describes this little cloud so well. 


I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

Begins the somewhat sappy poem by William Wordsworth. I admit that I never liked much Wordsworth but as I read this poem afresh I was struck the the ending stanza:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.



Where I would change the last word to "clouds" and ruin the rhyme scheme.


Wordsworth and John Constable, my constant companion, were contemporaries. I wonder if they ever met? Later critics considered both "romantics" in English literature and art. English Romanticism was a reaction against the Neoclassicism of the late 17th and early 18th centuries which re-imagined the ideals of ancient Greek and Rome. 


Romanticism emphasizes the solitary individual, love of nature, imagination over reason, passion for rural life, worship of beauty, and was fascinated with mysticism and myths of the past. Constable counts as a Romantic painter for me because of his celebration of landscape, nature, rural life and his essential honesty in portraying these things. I'm not sure what he and Wordsworth would have had to say to one another.


The cloud appeared over Masonic Lane about 6:10 pm. My notes on the back read: "white cumulus against a sea of gray." The medium is oil pastel, a particularly buttery one called Caran d"Ache Neopastels.

Smoke in the air

Our usual beautiful cumulus clouds have an added dimension of smoke from a huge lightning-ignited fire in the Great Dismal Swamp, surely one of the most apt place names of all time. The smell of the smoke and the smart to eyes and lungs in one aspect, but the clouds seem darker gray with other colors mixed in them.


Yesterday evening's painting was created with watercolor crayons, Caran d'Ache Neocolor II, and includes some white crayon for the first time. By that I mean that this is the first time I've colored in the white of a cloud. Previous paintings have use the color of the paper to represent the cloudy whites. This gives a different feel to the white areas and enables the artist to push back and forth the cloud/sky boundary.


This painting was done about 6:40 pm facing southwest with a overcast sky. I chose the area with a few holes of blue sky showing through in an interesting pattern. By the time I completed the work, the sky was uniformly gray. There was a light wind blowing north and bring the scent of the burning swamp. The painting looks almost map-like to me or like a satellite image of an island area with the sky as water full of sheltered coves and harbors.