Staring at the Sky

I have once again, in the last week or two, found myself spending what might be considered a more than normal amount of time with my eyes trained on the clouds above. Not, as it might be expected, at an airshow, well not in the normal sense of the word at least, but what might be considered the longest running and most spectacular of all airshows: the ever changing British cloudscape.

I was in the middle of a painting last week with low and slightly building summer cumulus sky as a substantial part of the backdrop. Despite the fact that I was working from photos I had taken of a sky at another time, I found it really helpful to be outside and gauge how my visual perception took in the not too dissimilar sky we had in the early part of the week. It is striking how one’s perception of the different overall tonal values of the same sky can change simply as the focus of one’s vision moves around to different parts of a landscape.

Then, during the week, the sky took a turn. It seemed there were now strong thermal up currents there, which tore at the simple and settled looking summer skies and pulled the clouds upwards into fierce, almost menacing, but spectacular towering forms, with sunlight playing mischievously with their edges. It turned some of the clouds into fiercely silhouetted forms and flattened others into shapes that oscillated between brilliantly reflective and ghost like disappearance.

It was crying out to be the subject of another painting. I know, however, the perils of having more than one painting on the go at once, so disciplined myself to the completion of the already started one and left this sky brooding in the background of my imagination.

It is a familiar sensation to me. It seems I have often had images and perceptions of skies simmering in the edges of my consciousness. I think it would also be true to say that for one reason or another I have probably spent a higher proportion of my life staring at the sky than most people ever do.

Going way back, I remember the long hours of lessons at secondary school, where second and third storey classrooms gave a superb view of the scudding clouds outside. These always seemed far more interesting than the tedious geometrical challenges being set by the maths teacher, who viewed my gazing out of the window as a pointless, time wasting distraction from his beloved geometry. Going further back still perhaps, I should have noticed warning signs when photo film I had developed, from my first ‘staying away’ school trip (when each of those 24 little shutter clicks had to count for something) were all of the progression of one beautiful sunset, whereas all my classmates had pictures of each other, larking around in all the places we’d been. It is probably little wonder that at the time the only career I could envisage for myself was as a pilot in the RAF.

This never came about, as my reactions weren’t quick enough to pass the fighter pilot aptitude tests at Biggin Hill. I ended up working outside on the land instead, which brought a different appreciation of the sky. Up until then my view of it had been primarily aesthetic, with a desire for the soaring sense of freedom that seemed attainable from flying. Now, with all day, every day, spent outside under the sky, it became the bringer of mood and weather to each day’s work.

Thomas Hardy’s writing had already introduced me to the conceptual idea of the intrinsic link between the mood and atmosphere of landscape and sky, and how these affected the perceptions of those whose lives are played out within them. Maybe this set me out with a peculiar sensibility to how the sky could change the feel of the same work on the ground from one day to the next. The difference in feeling between forking out a loose box in the hiatus of a farmyard on a still, hot summer’s day to the purposeful sense of movement experienced in the same task with scudding clouds and a clear fresh westerly breeze has to be experienced to be understood.

Working out there also brought a growing understanding, both logically and intuitively, of how the sky not only gifted the mood, but gifted foresight of the weather to come. Those barely noticeable cirrus clouds creeping in at the top of a hot summer sky were once unheeded by me, other than as another curious and pretty addition to the cloudscape. Over time they became one of the many cues that would foretell a brief reprieve from the relentless days of bale shifting under the hot sun, or later serve as a warning not to mow for hay. Some of the signs, like this one were visible and explicable, others were more in the nature of a sixth sense, something about the sky and atmosphere that you knew was different, but could never have put your finger on why, if pressed to explain.

Understanding those skies meant more and more to me. With the help of books I got to know and understand most of the different cloud types and their significance. In those pre-internet days, my dad would kindly tear the day's forecast synoptic charts out of his treasured daily paper in the morning, so that I could take them to work and try and understand what I was seeing in the sky as part of a wider weather pattern. It even brought new meaning to the esoteric poetical form of the wonderful lunchtime shipping forecast on the radio, and I would try to note down some of the relevant barometric pressures and their changes on that day’s map to see if I could understand how the frontal pattern was developing.

All this scientific enquiry was really interesting, and to some extent useful in gauging the weather patterns over me. But one of the real long term values of it has been to deepen my aesthetic appreciation of our spectacular cloud structures.
The mental grasp of the sheer vertical scale of many of our cloud formations is not obvious from the ground, although will be a constant familiarity to pilots. No longer was my view of the clouds mainly configured as a two dimensional backdrop, on a canvas as it were, but brought a constant awareness of a whole extra vast three dimensional landscape towering over the terrestrial one, ever changing and restlessly moving above it.

I think this facet of the ‘skyscape’ is most apparent in conditions such as those that arrested my attention the other day, when gentle settled summer clouds seemed to suddenly surge upwards, playing with light and form with such rapid speed.
It is at such moments that my mind takes to the air again, as it used to in those days of youth, staring out of the maths class window. This sky, tucked away in to my subconscious until the previous painting was complete, surged out once this point was reached and seemed to command me to paint it straight away and from ‘up there’ somehow.

As my mind has also been currently full with my current studies of the ‘The Hardest Day’ in the Battle of Britain, I could not but help to transport the sky back to this point in time. It resonated in me with an often described experience of the fighter pilots during the Battle: Moments after an intense dogfight, (with enemy aircraft and the immanence of death all around), they would suddenly find themselves completely alone, amongst the sheer beauty of the clouds, and found the juxtaposition of this against the fear and adrenalin of the moments before an indescribable contrast.

So using every ounce of both my intuitive and logical understanding of the sky before me, I did my best to transcribe it ten thousand feet up, a couple of hundred miles east, and eighty years back to try and capture something of what that moment might have been like.

If my work gets anywhere in helping to remember the significance of such moments, and the bravery of those who experienced them, then perhaps all that staring out of the window at clouds and all the sky watching that came after will be of more use than my maths teacher ever allowed it to be.