October 27th was very warm, with a high of 79 degrees and 77 percent humidity This was in advance of a cold front that has dropped the temperature overnight to the current 45 degrees.
Due to the cold front, a complex collection of clouds covered the evening sky. Cloud types in this sky are cirrostratus, cumulonimbus and cirrus which are all typical of a cold front.
This drawing was begun at about 6 pm with blue-gray, rose and crisp yellow-white clouds in the eastern sky. All that color and I decided to draw in graphite! I was intrigued by all the shapes and tones of the clouds so I found a nice sharp 4B pencil and got started.
Pencils are graded by their hardness. The harder the graphite the lighter the line drawn with it. Here's a link to the HB scale to see where 4B (soft) fits into the scheme. The old number 2 pencil from school days is usually an HB pencil which is in the middle of the scale.
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.
