GreygirlGarden: Looking at the Big Sky

I'm glad of the breaks in the wet weather but not so much for the sun and heat, more for the difference in the sky.
Colours come back into it. In the early morning it's a fragile blue sometimes softened by a warm pink. I saw my first sunset in ages last week. After too many days on end living under an overcast and heavy grey it's good to see white clouds again, not dishcloth ones, but the kind you only see in the summer.
Mare's Tail and Mackerel Scale (or cirrus and altocumulus), fine long wisps curling at the ends like combed hair.

Mare's Tail clouds

Mackerel clouds

It gets better. I went outside the other day and wierdly there was more space than before, a much wider view. It took a moment before I realised the row of dense conifers that had always been there were gone from the next-but-one garden!

Oh happy day :)

The privet with wild honeysuckle growing through it is in full flower, filling the air with a heavy honey-vanilla scent. It has become a bee metropolis, a pollen-palace.

All through the garden bees are joined by butterflies now and caterpillars are appearing.

Before dusk the swifts come out to wheel around, diving and playing, then the bats are skimming the sky which never quite goes fully dark.

The air is laced with the scent of sweet peas and lemon verbena, the bees are gone and everything is quiet.

Bumble bee

Swift

Best of all is that there are stars again and the Plough is right overhead just now. A night sky no longer hidden by cloud. The longer you look the deeper it becomes.

Skies lead me to the German Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich. This might seem irrational but I've spent weeks trying to find the kind of blue in his paintings for one of my bedroom walls. I want to look at sky rather than hospital white.

Realising this was a tall order I was determined to get something as close as I could, and finally found it.

It doesn't take long before I'm back looking at Turner. I read that his last words were, "The sun is God." Of course we'll never know if this is true or not, his last words could have been a lot less poetic and profound but it doesn't really matter.

"The sun is God" is believable since he spent his life painting light.

In the later paintings which are more abstract you can see absolutely that Turner's view of the world was as an endlessly shifting play of light and colour. Elemental atmosphere.

Some years ago at Tate Britain there was a blockbuster exhibition of Turner, Whistler and Monet. Currently at the Liverpool Tate there's another, until September, but this time it's the later works of Turner, Monet and Twombly.

The exhibition is in sections with paintings representing each artist hung together. These sections are titled, in true Romantic style, as:

Beauty, Power and Space, Atmosphere, Naught so sweet as Melancholy, The Seasons, Fire and Water, The Vital Force and A Floating World.

I might have to leave the garden to go see this.