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.
The forecast on October 21st was for a sunny fall day and it began clear and bright. As the day wore on, little clouds blew in from the south and by 4 pm when this painting was made, larger cumulus clouds were showing up.
These clouds kept company in the west on their way northeast. Later in the evening, the sky was full of clouds and by night, completely overcast.
Here is an excerpt from Kurt Badt's John Constable's Clouds:
Most of [John Constable's] cloud studies seem to have been painted in 1822, however, as Constable reported (on October 7), 'I made about fifty careful studies of skies, tolerably large to be careful.' Leslie, who was probably the first to see them, felt at once how extraordinary these studies were. He has told us that 'twenty of Constable's studies of skies made during this season were in his possession'; and he said 'there is not one among them in which a vestige of landscape is introduced. They are all painted in oil, on large sheets of thick paper, and all dated with the time of day, the direction of the wind, and other memoranda on their backs.'
Some days have few clouds and crisp blue skies. October 6th was one of these. Trying to make a smooth gradient of ultramarine to cerulean on rough watercolor paper was a pleasant challenge. The saturated paper tends to undulate with gravity then causing areas of greater or lesser pigment.
Here is inspiration from John Constable, from his fourth lecture in a series, June 6th, 1836, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on The History of Landscape Painting:
It was said by Sir Thomas Lawrence, that 'we can never hope to compete with nature in the beauty and delicacy of her separate forms or colours,--our only chance lies in selection and combination.' Nothing can be more true,--and it may be added, that selection and combination are learned from nature herself, who constantly presents us with compositions of her own, far more beautiful than the happiest arranged by human skill.
Well said, Mr Constable.
Saturday, the first of October, was a cool and cloudy day. We had a spectacular sunset full of orange and pink. By the time I got home to paint, just after 7 pm, these soft, rosy beauties were left for me in the western sky.
The cloud studies I've seen by John Constable haven't included any sunsets, however I found this one at the National Gallery of Australia. It looks like the end of a warm, dry autumn day. A long day of hard work harvesting in the fields of East Bergholt, England.
These puffy little altocumulus clouds, like looking up at cotton balls, celebrate two months of daily cloud paintings. Painted this morning about 8:30, they silently wafted northeast from the west in their cutely plump manner.
The Yale Center for British Art has many lovely paintings by John Constable including a great selection of cloud studies. Take a look!
After a solid week of gray skies and frequent rain, the evening of September 26th opened up a blue expanse to raise our damp spirits. This long, low-slung cumulus was south of Richmond around 6 pm in a small fleet of similar clouds.
These clouds seem sedate and respectable to me, not expressively emotional or romantic. Christopher Benfey, in his Slate Magazine article on Constable's cloud paintings at the Yale Center, writes:
What I've found with repeating viewing is that the cloud studies are more various than one might think. Far from being mere passive "impressions" or "observations" from nature, the cloud studies seem to be overtly expressive. They seem, in fact, to register quite distinct aesthetic programs, as though what Constable is classifying isn't clouds at all, but rather whole schools of painting, along with their dominant moods. The best analogy may be Chopin's Etudes, explorations of styles and modes with sharply circumscribed means.
If Benfey is correct in surmising Constable's inspiration stems from the technique of other painters, I confess that I find it limiting. Like other student artists at the Royal Academy, Constable copied classic pieces of art to hone his own technique. Naturally there is some Fragonard and Reynolds in there. What I see in Constable's work is a yearning to set down a genuine and specific landscape.
These cumulus giants at Sandbridge Beach stretched for miles in the air and seemed to reach the beach below them. The wind was strong and from the south teasing the cloud shapes into curled locks. I was facing north and slightly west at about 2:30 pm with a full warm sun behind me.
I write inscriptions on the reverse of each painting with the date. location, time, weather conditions, and direction. John Constable did the same but included more information. Here is one of his from September 11, 1821:
Hampstead /Sept 11 1821 10 to 11 Morning / Clouds silver grey on warm ground / Light wind to the S.W. / fine all day--but rain / in the night following
Lovely, lovely day.
These wispy cirrostratus mixed with cirrus clouds covered the sky just after 8 am on Friday, August 19th. The dull sky had tints of lavender, cyan and cool grays mixed in the whiteness.
John Constable may have written "cirrus" on the back on one of his paintings. Not all art historians agree on this interpretation of his handwriting. We know from his letters that he was very much interested identifying cloud types and categorizing weather phenomena.
Constable looked on landscape painting as a natural science, an activity to be studied methodically. In his last public lecture in 1836, he said:
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
What a different age it was nearly two hundred years ago. Paintings as experiments--well they certainly are that, but not scientific ones.
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.
This was painted looking north out the window of Panera Bread last evening about 7:30 pm--big glass windows, great food and good friends (and no mosquitoes). Love that air conditioning also, but definitely not en plein air.
The mass of shadows beneath each of these cumulus clouds was rich with subtle colors. I used alizarin crimson and cadmium yellow pale to hint at these shades. The ephemeral nature of clouds makes it so much fun to paint them. Clouds are moving, changing, growing, shrinking and becoming something else every second. The light on clouds shifts with the sun's position and that of other clouds around them.
I understand John Constable's fascination with clouds and admire the cloud studies he made during the summer's of 1821 and 1822 in Hampstead, England. I enjoy them much more than his "six-footers," the massive paintings he submitted to the Royal Academy for annual exhibition. Those detailed scenes of life on the canal locks like The Hay Wain seem lifeless compared to the fresh cloud studies Constable created. That is probably my 21st century sensibilities speaking, however. I do think Constable enjoyed painting them partially because they were just for himself and for later reference in the six-footers he worked on during the fall and winter.
The standard publication about weather available during Constable's lifetime was Thomas Forster's Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena, published in 1812, which Constable thought "was far from right." Constable identified the clouds in one of his studies as "cirrus." He was therefore familiar with the terminology created by Luke Howard, who published in 1818 a classification of cloud formations. From Walker's book on Constable:
Constable considered his own empirical studies as reliable as the work of these early meteorologists, and in the same 1836 letter to George Constable he wrote: "My observations on clouds and skies are on scraps and bits of paper, and I have never yet put them together so as to form a lecture, which I shall do, and probably deliver at Hampstead next summer."
By "next summer," Constable was dead.
This night watercolor was painted facing northeast in light rain with scattered clouds and light wind. Ambient light reflects back into the lower clouds and makes the scene brighter. It was, however, painted about 9:30 at night.
A noun become a verb? What is "skying"? Been reading about and looking at lots of John Constable recently. From John Constable by John Walker published by Abrams, New York in 1978, comes this information:
In 1821 Constable began to work seriously at what he called "skying," making studies of cloud effects. To inform himself of the appearance of the sky under various weather conditions he determined to put together his own observations of atmospheric phenomena and to record these in quick sketches.
This charcoal study from last night was facing east with a fairly uniform cloud cover. The variation is shade was strongly influenced by ambient light from street lights beyond the range of the image. So much fun to get my fingers dirty with vine and hard charcoal!
