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.

"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.

Another sunny day in Virginia

Yes, the leaves are turning brown, the grass is toasted and the ears of corn whither on the stalk--another sunny day in Virginia. It seems that each day has an endless afternoon parade of white fluffy clouds across a French ultramarine sky.

The end of summer is coming soon and I hope for some variation in cloud formations and light. This brain-shaped cumulus shape floated toward the northeast at about four o'clock in the afternoon. The strong afternoon sun was just out of the composition to the upper left and bleached the cloud edges to a blaze of light.


The bright light seems to have bleached my brain into a headache. I'm trying to imagine John Constable with his painting easel and kit, wearing a summer hat and squinting at the shimmering landscape around the River Stour in Suffolk, England in 1822. I bet he got headaches, too. Perhaps I should bathe my temples with vinegar and sit in a darkened room. Or, choke down some willow bark tea sweetened with honey. That's how I imagine headache may have been treated in the early 19th century. 

Full of awe

Last night's sunset was exquisite--full of looming, animated sunset-tinted monsters like  this watercolor. As I stood in front of Armour House watching these massive cumulus clouds boil above me, I felt my insignificance. These were truly awful clouds.

It seems appropriate to quote Philip Levine, newly appointed US Poet Laureate. From Levine's poem Clouds:


The clouds have seen it all, in the dark
they pass over the graves of the forgotten
and they don't cry or whisper.

They should be punished every morning,
they should be bitten and boiled like spoons.

The full poem is available here. 

Armour House and Gardens at Meadowview Park

Beautiful day for weather and clouds! Huge cumulonimbus towers moving across the deep blue sky at Armour House in Henrico, Virginia with rain and thunderstorms coming in.

These clouds moved fast to the west. Since I faced northwest, they were moving toward the left of the watercolor. This was painted at noon with dark storm clouds at my back. As the afternoon has progressed, we've had no rain but lots of overcast shadows.


Armour House is part of Henrico County Recreation & Parks and is a delightful place to walk, paint and just be. The staff is great and they offer classes and lots of fun activities for all ages. Nice skies, too.

Constable on clouds

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.

Skying?

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!

The first painting

Another 102 degree day with scattered clouds and middling humidity. This summer seems to go on forever. I've set myself a task to create a sky work each day--a painting or drawing in any medium. Today's watercolor involved finding materials, paints, brushes, watercolor block. There's nothing like being an artist out of practice, retraining the hand-eye connection and using mental muscles weak with inactivity.

A cloud a day, a mental discipline and a work of art. We'll see, won't we?

This evening watercolor was painted of rapidly changing skies facing east with an oncoming storm making the clouds turn gray and streaky. Higher clouds retained the color of the sun and the odd blue patch of sky seems more like positive than negative space. The darkness of the little blue clouds moving in front of the blue sky looks strange--at one point it reminded me of a rabbit hopping through space.

Here's another warm up sketch of quick clouds with vibrant colors.