i have had my head in the clouds again, a mild attack of the vapours… the heavy rains came (more of a deluge, really) and then swiftly went away giving us brilliant blue skies for a day or so, but then those rain clouds gathered ominously again…
[sketchbook pages, july 2010]
these are some small sketches from the last few days, all completed during the course of travelling to places – by humble bus, no less. it’s a surprisingly bumpy ride by bus in the countryside – the pencils which i thought were securely retained in a pencil case threatened to jump overboard and skittle across the floor of the bus, as one did, but luckily the bus was close to empty…
n.b. all of these sketches are all 14cm x 20cm.
some rain clouds… i guess they are cumulus… with a peek of sky blue…
this is my favourite sketch of one day’s travelling, a brief glimpse of rainfall in the distance (or perhaps it was just the sun’s rays as seen through water vapour after a rainstorm), sketched on the return journey…
here is another one completed around lunchtime… it was bright and breezy with some sunshine, the clouds gathered up (so to speak) and it was ‘looking like rain again’…
here is another sketch from earlier in the week (a single, small grey cloud, amongst the white fluff, that caught my eye). i had, to save some money, decided to draw on both sides of the paper in my sketchbooks – but i have noticed now how the fugitive nature of graphite has transferred tones between the sketches, thus unintentionally clouding the drawings still further…
perhaps these incidental smudgings of graphite add a little life to the process..
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there seems to be no desire to use these sketches as part of a preliminary process for painting – i think they will feed into my painting in other, less obvious ways…
artists sometimes use photography to record the details of things, as visual references for their work, but plein air drawing (or as seen through a window in these instances) as a process has its own sensibility – one that is exploratory and purely responsive, of the moment, of making brisk marks in real time, marks that have no definitive end…
i have, i think, a bit of a sketchaholicism when it comes to travelling (when not driving). there is the time and space to just gaze, to drift into momentary vistas, spied for perhaps only a few seconds. this inspires a loose, gestural style of drawing that i continue to work into for a few minutes, with the landscape or sky still there to refer to outside the window, slowing shifting in its perspective… this creates an immediacy and vitality of drawing, which if one were ’still’ might produce a more technically-laboured outcome as one wrestles with capturing the singular ‘view’. here, in these sketches, the most time i spent on a sketch would be three or four minutes… i look, i draw, i memorise – perhaps it is a form of (re)training, for the eyes and the visual memory, to hone one’s perception, to be more receptive and impulsive in drawing what one sees… and i like the self-imposed restrictions of drawing on the move…
for a little contextual reference it would be churlish not to mention suffolk-born john constable and also jmw turner for their studies & sketches of skies and clouds. constable and turner were contemporaries, born only a year apart, with perhaps some rivalry if not open hostility towards one another at the time. three of the studies below are from the period 1822-23… perhaps the industrial, revolutionary smogs of those times made turbulent skies into art…?
it also begs the big question, who’s the master of the skies, constable or turner?… constable appears to offer a deeply respectful, naturalistic view of the environment (rising metaphorically from the dark shadows of the industrial revolution), whereas turner immerses himself (and us, in turn) in the subjective nature of the elements as a means to reach the landscape of the sublime…
John Constable, cloud study, circa 1822. oil on paper, 476 x 575 mm
John Constable, study of clouds, 5 september, 1822. oil on paper, 298 x 483 mm
what is most interesting in constable’s studies is how they give an insight into his process. his often detailed annotations seem to offer some evidence of the influence of the advances in science during the age of enlightenment, although i am sure that romantic painters such as constable would have been a little sceptical.
constable produced many preparatory studies and the final paintings were then completed in the studio – the most famous, the haywain, was actually completed far away from the suffolk valley it depicted, in hampstead, london. he was truthful to the spirit of nature as he perceived it, a deeply nostalgic and poetic vision of landscape, at a time when the real countryside bore the traces of a mechanised agriculture. i wonder if back then his paintings were just seen as aspirational manifestations of a rural idyll existing only in the mind – he once said of his clouds that they were ‘the chief organ of sentiment‘ in his paintings…
JMW Turner, storm at sea, circa 1822-3. watercolour on paper, 178 x 257 mm
JMW Turner, study of clouds, with a shower passing over water, circa 1826-32. watercolour on paper, 307 x 487 mm
you can view turner’s sktchbooks online at the tate…
constable is undoubtedly the better painter of real skies but turner captures the essential, intangible beauty of the ethereal elements. turner seems to delight in the deft touch, the merest suggestion of colour in atmospheric movement, of a fresh breeze or a sea mist rising. this is meteorology without the boring science bit. these are not absolute recordings but sensory responses and turner’s later paintings always remind me that less is often more.
i find the implied sensitivity in these small studies most fascinating when what we know of turner’s personal life is that he was often brash and, how shall we say, a tad unrefined in demeanour, but, let’s not spoil the painterly magic. turner’s magnificence as a painter and his influence on modern art is undeniable – as rothko once apparently said, ‘this man Turner, he learnt a lot from me‘. sometimes, i can’t help imagining that if turner had just cleaned his brush on a scrap of paper it would be later viewed as yet another sketch of a storm at sea… constable, i think, would not have been so carefree…
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lastly… i just penned a quick haiku style poem, in honour of some fluffy white clouds…
reigning clouds
sometimes flirt a little
when spurning summer’s heated advances…
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