A look out of the window last week

... while making tea was like this: every morning, afternoon and evening. The distance depending on the cloud base, rain and general fog.

Amazing what you can find in this, if you stretch your eyes, mind and general outlook.

So, here's the teaser for the recent entry in our Moleskine project. It's posted off today to Vivien, so I may show the rest in a short while. This one's been good fun.

Well... realising that among the two hundred photos I took, there is not a single one from the view I painted most over the past week, here's a sketch... a sunny one:

The most magnificient drama, Ink and neo ii in Moleskine (26x13cm)

And another one in pastel, sunny again. Same spot, different drama in the skies:

While making Tea, Pastel in Moleskine (21x13cm)

Paintings I like #2: Bird Cloud, Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger, Vogelwolke (Wolke nach dem Sturm),1926
Oil on canvas, 44x72cm
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA

Vogelwolke - Wolkenvogel; Bird Cloud - Cloud Bird.

It was the onomatopoeic [that sounds rather posh for the German lautmalerisch that I had in mind] qualities of the German title of Feininger's painting that kept me occupied when I first saw it: The sounds the words make.
Or was it the vast expanse of the cloud over a low horizon seascape...
Or was it the beauty of the concept: an airy cloud in the shape of a huge bird.
Or was it the yellow of the beach and the lonely figure on the left.

In any case: it's been a firm favourite of mine since I first came across it in print. The format and the rather restrained composition: strong horizontal lines, a single figure to the front left and above it all the majestic cloud, its wings, its beak.

After my sketching of lonely women in the Fogg Museum I ventured around the corner and stumbled right across it. Didn't know it was there, so it was an absolute surprise, gave me goosebumps, made me circle around the painting for ages, up close, far away, almost poking my nose at it, trying to figure out how Feininger made all those lines, variations of colour - restraint and yet so varied. Walk away, went back - in the process almost ignored the excellent German expressionists that hang close by: E-L Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Max Beckmann. Sorry, guys - you'll have to wait until the next time.

It's all about the Vogelwolke/Wolkenvogel today.

Two sketches of the Bird cloud, 1924
(top one in pencil, bottom one in ink and wash)
Also at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA

And these I found in my Feininger book: sketches after he saw the Bird after a storm, note how he changed the composition to a horizontal one in the oil painting, done a couple of years after the sketches.

Constable and Turner at V&A

In the end it took me two visits to the V&A to find the paintings I was looking for. On the first day I, mistakenly, thought there would be late opening, so just as I finally found the two galleries with Constable's oil sketches and Turner and Constable's landscapes, the museum was closing - I wonder if that had anything to do with my endless browsing through the museum shop beforehand ;)

Yesterday, however, before I went back home and made sure I would get to look at the sketches.
Having posted one of Constable's cloud studies in the earlier post, I was curious to see with my own eyes and try to find out more about this clouds/sky studies. Much of the sketches were donated to the museum by his daughter in the 1880s and give rich insights into his working and study practices. They are often painted on paper/card and he kept these as reference material for his larger paintings.

As for record keeping, these were the additional notes Constable wrote on the back of the cloud study #82:
'Looking S.E. noon. Wind very brisk. & effect bright & fresh. Clouds moving very fast. With occasional very bright openings to the blue' Dated Sept. 5. 1822

I'm interested and intrigued how such studies - of which Constable said, according to the museum notes, to have completed over 50 reasonably large ones by October 1822 - are becoming part of ones working repertoire - the one when one knows how to present and represent a cloudy but fresh evening sky in summer. It reminds me also of how my life drawing tutor - with a keen focus on human anatomy - stressed again and again that observation is just one part, the other part is knowing and understanding anatomy.

With all this talk of working knowledge, reflexivity and experience, my geography friends will laugh - it is plain clear that I've just been to a conference and my head is full of academia talk. But, hey, isn't it nice to be able to make those connections? More to follow, I suppose.

Here, for some exploration of the gallery if you aren't in London is the V&A website who offers a rich resource and also some virtual tours through its various room:

Constable's oil sketches in room 88
The sketches are mainly on the left hand side and you can zoom in close to look at them

Turner and Constable's landscapes in room 87
Three of Turner's seascapes are on the left here, with Constables landscape paintings to the right

The virtual tour uses Quicktime software to allow you to move around and zoom in - it works pretty well.

Window to the sky

When out in the countryside it struck me that, if I want to paint more Scottish landscapes, I need to get to grips with skies - or more precisely: clouds. With a constant breeze, it is the changing skyscapes that set mood, influence lighting and reflection. In response, I've started to make sketches from my breakfast table out to the sky above the opposite row of tenements:


Neopastel II and graphite in sketchbook




Neopastel, marker pen and graphite on Bristol Board, 8x8 cm

And then I came across this skyscape by the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi in my daily calendar:



It made me laugh - the text on the back emphasised the drama in the sky in contrast to the uneventful landscape - I was really intrigued to what let him paint the cumuli clouds in such a naive manner. I found a retrospective of his a few years back at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, with most of his paintings being intricate interiors. This site here shows some of them, as well as another landscape.