Earthquake sunset

Truly there is nothing stranger than standing still while the earth sways and trembles beneath your feet. That's what happened yesterday just before 2 pm. And, here is the sunset of this odd day, an abstract color gradient with a few ghostly little clouds in the upper left. This was painted after 8:15 pm facing west.


With little humidity and few clouds, the sky was crystal clear and full of pale color. Isn't it interesting that the dusk light can appear green? That phenomenon is called a green flash and is caused by light refracting through the atmosphere. It was also strange that the little clouds didn't catch any reflected sunset colors.


What a tranquil end to a rattled day. This is definitely a "skying" painting, kind of an atmospheric impression of sunset on August 23rd, 2011, earthquake day.

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!