The last day of August!

A cool morning lacking humidity, the sky is crisp as a Macintosh apple. Looking west again about 10 am this morning. This is the same view of the sky from last night's starry sky, but 12 hours later. The sky was predominately cerulean blue with wispy cirrocumulus clouds streaked across the blueness. These fluffs drifted slowly across the sky moving south at a leisurely pace.


Today I've been keeping this blog for a month and painting every day.

My attempt at the vast night sky

In my last entry, I mentioned the challenge of using watercolor to portray the deep night sky. So last night I went out on the back porch to search the vast sky for color and composition. I was presented with a lovely view of the planet Saturn on the left with the bright star Arcturus in the middle and the Canes venatici stars, Alkaid, Mizar and Alioth on the right. A lovely night indeed!


It was a lot of fun to put down all these washes of color--glaze over glaze of dark blues, violets and blacks. Because so many people still have no electric power due to the hurricane, the ambient light is lower than usual. This is a painting of the western sky about 10 pm looking toward and above downtown Richmond where it is usually much brighter along the horizon.

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.

Irene part 2

The morning after the wind, rain and falling trees dawned beautiful, cool and clear. Leaves and branches littered lawns, porches and cars. Big trees fell inches from cars without damaging the cars; the trees, of course, were totaled.


This watercolor painted about 6 am facing the dawn seemed a good omen. The not-yet-visible sun cast a warm glow on the upper clouds. The departing storm clouds remained gray and dreary. That was the backside of Irene, now a tropical storm, on her way to New York and New England.


So many homes and businesses without power in central Virginia, about 1.2 million. We will clean up, repair and go on.

Irene part 1

Early this morning, before dawn, the first threads of clouds from this massive hurricane curled over central Virginia. These clouds were glowing whitely in the night sky. The clouds have no shadows because there is no sun I suppose. It makes the cloud color and movement seem unearthly which, of course, it is.


The sky was a river of blue-black ink with the white clouds swirling through it. I've seen clouds at night glowing with colors of pink and orange. I wonder where the color comes from if there is no sun. I painted clouds from hurricane Bertha once that looked like little pink cakes on a dark blue tray moving quickly through the sky. We will see what else Irene has to offer once she has passed through Virginia. Right now we have lots of rain.

Thunderstorms from the west

Big beautiful cumulus clouds moved in yesterday evening a gave us a delightful thunderstorm in advance of hurricane Irene. Again these cumulus clouds were underlaid by thick stratus "dinner plates".


The day was breezy and warm but there was a hint of changing seasons in the air. Plants that looked thoroughly dejected revived in the rain and lifted their leaves.


Note that there is no earth visible in this watercolor, painted about 6:30 pm while facing west. The more solid forms in the lower third of the sheet are also clouds.

From earthquake to hurricane

August has been an eventful geological and weather month. As we still feel the aftershocks of our earthquake, we prepare for hurricane Irene who will come visiting on Saturday. She is projected to be a category 2 hurricane with winds of about 100 mph (that's about 160 kph). Since central Virginia is not on the projected path, our forecast is for wind and rain as the lady brushes by.


Perhaps due to the changing seasons or the weather phenomena we had very interesting clouds this morning. Fluffy cumulus clouds sitting on thick white porcelain stratus dinner plates. Higher cirrus clouds streaked away up high beyond the cumulus. The effect is entrancing.


This was painted about 10 am facing northwest.

Broken cumuli

Facing the same western sky as last night's sunset, I saw this parade of cumulus clouds (plural cumuli) blew by this morning about 9:30 am. High cirrus clouds are visible to the left and well above these tumbling cumuli with their moving windows on the cerulean blue sky.


When I look at the sky and then look back at the watercolor paper, I have to make my eyes shift between positive space (real clouds) and negative space (white paper). It is a mental challenge sometimes beyond my capacity!


Those winking windows fascinate me--the clouds constantly moving, opening and closing the apertures of sky. I love the colors in the clouds also; the warm and cool grays show the weight of moisture held inside the cloud, the pale blues barely obscuring the sky beyond. What a wonderful challenge.

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.

Sunset reflections

These puffs ran across the eastern sky last night just after 8 pm reflecting the sunset brilliance of the west. They moved rapidly to the east, chasing one another like puppies and changing shapes as they flew by.


Sunset abstractions is an even better way to describe them. These little pieces of paint waxed and waned on the paper, overlapping and mixing to create new and unplanned combinations. More scientific experiments on paper.

Sunday thunderstorms

During this very busy day, I managed to see these astonishingly beautiful clouds in the southeast above downtown Richmond as thunderstorms moved in from the west at about 4 pm. The light changed quickly as the larger, heavy clouds rolled in behind me. These cumulus clouds still caught the weird light of the day and held the dark of the coming storm.


This was a strong but brief storm with rumbling thunder and distant lightning. As it has so often been this summer, there was not enough rain. Gardens and lawns exhibit that late summer droop of fatigue and thirst.

Fog and light

Early Saturday morning I looked out the bathroom window and saw... fog! I haven't seen fog for a long time because our summer has been so hot and dry. It cooled on Friday night and this lovely, murky glow was the predawn result facing east.


What is fog? Fog is a low-lying cloud caused by moisture condensing into droplets that can't rise up into the air. Here's a great Yahoo Answer:

During the day, the sunlight heats the earth and warm air right above it rises. During the night, the earth radiates back heat into space. At sunrise the earth is often colder than the air above. This is called an inversion because air doesn't rises anymore.

If the temperature near the ground has fallen under what is called the dew point temperature then the air can't sustain any more moisture as vapour and has to condense it into droplets. That's when fog appear.

Fog can also appear for several other reasons but it must involve very moist and relatively cold air that doesn't rise. As said above, fog is exactly the same as a cloud at ground level.

Saturday morning's fog is a sign of the changing seasons. Fall is coming.

High, hot & hazy

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.

Dismal clouds

Soot-stained clouds full of rain blew up from the southeast today. The fire in the Great Dismal Swamp continues to burn. Most of the day we had scattered clouds and sunlight, but about 4 pm the skies darkened and we got a shower you could see coming at you across the fields.


I was buying pickling cucumbers at Gallmeyer's Veggie Stand when the rain came down. It didn't last though. When I painted these dark clouds at 4:20 pm the rain was still holding off and blowing north. Hope it rains on the swamp.

Cloud portraits

When I first thought about this project, I imagined that I'd be painting portraits of clouds each day. After thinking about it longer, I decided that a cloud portrait was too limiting as a concept. I want to include sky without clouds as well and a whole sky worth of clouds in later work.


This is a cloud portrait, however, and the subject sat very still in the sky while I painted it. I was facing west and there was almost no wind today at about 11:15 am. This includes the first use of cobalt blue in my palette. By the way, all my grays are mixed, no boughten grays or blacks for me!

On the rough

Lovely big cumulus clouds wafting through Virginia today. These were painted facing east at about 2 pm with the wind lightly blowing southeast.


This watercolor is painted on Arches rough watercolor block. If you look at the blue sky above the middle white cloud you can see some characteristic puddling of the blue pigment in a kind of pebbled texture. Also a feature of painting on rough paper is the broken brush stroke where the brush hair bounces over the uneven surface. An example of this is in the  edge of the right-most white cloud on the border of the blue sky.

Cold press, hot press and rough?

I paint on Arches French watercolor paper which has great surface quality and is very durable. One can scrub, rub, erase, load it with water and pigment and still it survives and looks great.


Watercolor paper is available in three surface textures: hot press, cold press and rough. I never paint on hot press paper. It has been rolled smooth and is excellent for detailed work which isn't what I am interested in. 


I like both cold press and rough paper. The surface texture of cold press preserves the tooth that is smoothed flat in hot press paper. This surface texture creates small puddles of pigment and allows a more broken area of color on the sheet. The rough texture is my favorite because of the uneven surface which creates all kinds of opportunities for happenstance color interactions. After the painting has dried, ridges of color collect around puddles and form fascinating little bits of paint.


This sunset was painted yesterday on cold press paper about 8:20 pm facing west with low stratus clouds looking almost like distant mountains. For contrast, I'll use rough for the next painting.

Rain, finally!

Lovely, lovely rain-swollen cumulus clouds over all of central Virginia--hooray! We had rain last night and sporadically thoughout the day today with more forecast for tonight and tomorrow. Here is a view of the sky at about 12:15 pm facing south with light winds from the west and scattered showers which landed on me and this little watercolor.

There is no blue sky peeking through these beauties. They are low and heavy clouds moving along and dropping rain as they will. This was painted at Armour House to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw" (great fiddle version) from an ice cream truck in a nearby neighborhood.

"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.

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. 

Clouds out the window

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.

Stratocumulus?

These scattered fluffy clouds in a row, possibly stratocumulus, reminded me of Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey which just celebrated 70 years since its publication. Mrs Mallard and her progress through Boston with her brood was an inspiration to parents who wanted safer streets and easier crossings.  McCloskey's charcoal drawings are lively and reflect the personalities of the mallard parents and ducklings.

These clouds trailed by at about 8:15 pm last evening in the pale eastern sky catching a rosy reflection of the sunset. Stratocumulus clouds are thought to warn of coming thunderstorms and wind but once again the rain fell elsewhere. The parched grass is crunchy underfoot and the leaves are turning early and falling from the willow and maples.


This is a new Arches watercolor block in an almost 8-inch square format that I find very attractive. There is nothing like new art supplies to create excitement and excite creativity. 

Catching up!

The skies have been tumultuous and exciting--promise of thunderstorms that never rain into my garden. Great for painting but bad for flowers and vegetables. Friday's sunset watercolor was painted about 8:20 pm facing west with some scraggly cumulus clouds crawling along slowly above the trees.

The sunset colors were just beginning to appear in the clouds but I was driven indoors by mosquitoes. I am using an older traveler's Winsor & Newton watercolor kit which contains half pans of pigment. It is very handy to slip this folding metal palette on my left thumb, but challenging for brush size. My preference is for larger brushes which don't always dip cleanly into the half pans. I like to think of the adjacent color as a bonus, but will use smaller brushes if I find that I'm creating muddy colors!

Saturday was a incredibly busy and exhausting so this little pencil and charcoal sketch of thunder clouds was all I could manage. There are high cirrus clouds above and away from the fluffy cumulus rain clouds. 


Sunday was cumulus cloud-fest--a feast for the eyes and, eventually, a few drops of rain. These big, fluffy clouds were painted about 5:30 pm before the brief storm facing east with the storm coming in from the southwest.  


Again the positive and negative space is a mental challenge in watercolor. The fluffy white mass of the cloud is simply the white of the paper. The massive shadow beneath the cloud is the closest to us on the ground and it can sometimes be a barrier to seeing the entire cloud with all its nuances of grays and whites.


The contrast between the deep ultramarine blue sky and the crisp white cumulus fluff is my favorite part of this painting. I also like the cerulean blue peeking out between clouds and the richness of the gray shadows.

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.