Ten years ago, November 2014, with much trepidation, I wrote my very first article for InSide the Back Mountain, in which I reflected on my love for plein air painting at Harveys Lake. In this month of Thanksgiving, I am so very grateful and blessed for this opportunity to write my 121st article. What a gift to share ways of seeing our beloved Back Mountain through the artist’s eye!
The very best blessing from my years of writing has been the friends I have made through these articles. Ann Sweeney was my very first “magazine” friend who, lo, those many years ago, burst into my studio like the ray of energetic sunshine she is, just to visit! Since then, we have laughed, talked, texted, and discovered numerous shared preferences, interests, and tastes (especially blueberries!) In these ensuing years, she has supplied me with fabulous photos from her travels and my teen art students have won numerous awards for their artwork based on them. On my phone there’s an album with hundreds of Ann Sweeney photos, including those referenced in these three skyscapes! In my scrapbook, a poem I collected perhaps forty years ago reads, “God knew we needed something more than budding earth and sky, and so He sent us friends to love, who lift our spirits high,” (author unknown). It reminds me of Ann. We both love skies and clouds and Ann, who lives in Chase, has a wonderful view of both morning and evening skies.
As every landscape painter knows, the sky can often take up over half the area of our painting, yet even today very few art schools teach the art of the skyscape. For centuries artists have attempted to paint nature, but, for the most part, the sky has been the backdrop, not the subject. The British painter John Constable said the sky is the source of light and governs everything. After his death, the world became aware of over 100 cloudscapes painted by Constable through direct observation–not for exhibition but for reference to use in his studio paintings. The British artist JMW Turner is revered for his atmospheric light, dramatic weather effects and his cosmic skies. In America, the Hudson River School artists painted skies with a realistic brush and a spiritual mind: Bierstadt, Cole, Durand, Cropsey, and others.
My hero of skyscapes is the American painter Eric Sloane. In his 1978 book For Spacious Skies, he wrote of being up in a plane with aviator Wiley Post who, while gazing out the window observed, “Someday an artist will come along and paint just clouds and sky.” As a lover of skies and weather, America’s first television weatherman, and collector of hundreds of weather logs and journals written by early American farmers, Eric Sloane became an expert sky artist, and his art and writings have inspired my entire career.
A cloud is simply rising air carrying water vapor, a collection of uncountable water droplets. There are four main kinds of clouds: the layered stratus, the puffy cumulus, the wispy cirrus, and the rain filled nimbus. Combinations of these and prefixes describing height further identify cloud forms.
In “Full Moon over Chase,” the sky is nighttime’s deep blue black, but the clouds are lit by the moon. I had fun painting the altocumulus clouds transforming into nimbus. These are mid-level clouds which showcase moisture, the cause of the moonglow color.
“Red in the Morning, Sailors Take Warning” depicts altostratus and nimbostratus mid-level
clouds–definitely foretelling a change of weather!
Altocumulus clouds cheerfully enhance “Sunny Evening” like patches of cotton. These mid-level clouds can be 15-20,000 feet high. The American painter Winslow Homer wrote, “The sky could be the complete palette of any painter.” Just for fun, I decided not to use black paint in any of these foregrounds. I simply mixed together the darkest hues used in each painting, because the sky provides the light (and therefore the color) for the land!
To the art critic and philosopher John Ruskin, the sky was “spiritual in its tenderness, Divine in its infinity… human in its passions, reflecting mankind and proclaiming the Creator.” In today’s world, the mention of God has become a political problem, but President Abraham Lincoln, who established a national day for Thanksgiving in 1863, said, “I cannot imagine anyone looking at the sky and denying God.”
We all live at the bottom of the sky. What better time to appreciate our awesome skies–with all their beautiful form and color–and to appreciate our neighbors and our friends InSide the Back Mountain? I wish you all a happy and blessed Thanksgiving!
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 publication of InSide the Back Mountain.