On a bitter spring
day, a painter’s thoughts turn to clouds and how to paint them. It beats going outside.
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Rainstorm over the Sea,
c.1824-28, John Constable
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Yesterday, I asked Shary Cobb Fellows whether the Mary
Day had hauled last year. “I think so,” she mused, “because these boats
need their bottoms done every year.”
“Then how did I miss her?” I wondered. A few hours in the
blistering, paint-peeling wind answered that question. It was probably too
miserable to paint that week.
I wrapped myself in the blizzard blanket that’s still in my
car. However, I could barely squeeze the paint out of my tubes. My easel was
thrumming in the wind. I’ve got a good start and if the weather cooperates
before the Mary Day moves out, I’ll
be able to finish.
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Easter Morning, 1835, Caspar
David Friedrich
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Most of the schooner fleet were originally coastal cargo or
fishing boats, saved from ignominious decay in some shaded inlet by their
conversion to the tourist trade. Mary Day
is different; she was purpose-built in the 1960s as a tourist boat. I chose a
high angle, painting off an access road that leads down into the shipyard. It’s
a pretty view, but it magnified the wind, and the sky was terribly gloomy.
Gloom has its purposes. Caspar David Friedrich used it to
convey a world in mourning in his Easter
Morning, above.
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The Thames above Waterloo Bridge, c. 1830-5 Joseph Mallord William Turner
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Fog, too, can convey emotional moods as varied as that in Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge,
Sunlight Effect to J. M. W. Turner’s The
Thames above Waterloo Bridge. They were both painting the dangerous industrial pea soupers that plagued London until the Clean Air Act of 1956, and
they handled the subject in very different ways.
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The Maas at Dordrecht,
c. 1650, Aelbert Cuyp
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When the land is flat and low or the subject is the sea,
clouds assume monumental importance. It is no surprise that the Dutch Golden
Age Painters had a particular mastery of the sky in all its phases and
seasons.
The Danish painter Christen Købke had
a special affinity for the flat, low light of the far north, in those times when
clouds barely permeate the overall gloom. A nationalist and a Romantic, he was
determined to paint his nation’s delicate beauty on its own terms.
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Roof Ridge Of Frederiksborg Castle, Christen Købke
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John
Constable did many field studies of clouds, which are startling in their
modernity. “Skies must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the
composition,” he wrote. “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in
which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of
sentiment.”
The example I’ve shown is close to a modern gesture drawing,
a quick capture of that moment when the clouds start dumping their load of
water as they move in from the sea. It is not just a rainstorm, it is “an extraordinary
force of emotion,” as critic Andrew Shirley observed.
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An Teallach between Bristol and Mullagragh, James Morrison, University of Sterling Art
Collection
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The finest cloud painter working today is Scotland’s James Morrison.
Born in Glasgow in 1932, he studied at the Glasgow
School of Art and is an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy. His
paintings of the landscapes around his home in Angus and of Assynt in
Sutherland are, in truth, mostly sky studies. He is a meticulous observer of
the movement and development of clouds.
I have written about how to paint clouds here,
using examples from my own work. It’s important to know the different types of
clouds and how they move across space. Yes, you can paint clouds without
being able to draw, but they’re not going to be as convincing as those that are
carefully observed. As with everything, practice makes perfect.
