Good Morning!

Bellini's Agony in the Garden may seem an odd way to rise and shine but for whatever reason I thought of this gorgeous sky and thought to share it with you. You have likely been up early and seen dawn. Isn't it wonderful that Bellini managed to capture it just so!

It seems so easy that he would have produced such a sky given the great skies of Turner, Winslow Homer and others. But this painting was produced in the 1460s when such naturalism was still uncommon. Perhaps Christ found comfort not only in the vision of an angel with a chalice but also the possibilities of a new day.

At any rate, here is wishing you a day unencumbered with phantom visitors but filled with all the beauties of glorious summer!

Storms

The skies opened up and poured water, releasing some tension from the sky if none of the heat or humidity. I sit at my desk most days which faces a window of trees, the sky more or less visible depending on the season and the lushness of the folliage. When the gray overcast caught my attention, I checked the weather and looked forward to the downfall predicted. I enjoy that kind of sudden, thundering but short-lived tempest.

All this reminded me of one of my very favorite pictures. It is a study by Turner at the Tate. This picture is from my time there last winter and I include here unmodified because the wall and the frame parallel my experience here at my desk where my peripheral vision is filled as I stare through the window at the shape shifting clouds.

I keep a postcard of this on my bookcase to the right of where I sit in front of my window and stare at it sometimes instead of my view. Some pictures do that. I shouldn't be too surprised as Turner is endlessly known for his skies, but I like the idea of lounging in these clouds as much as I enjoy imagining them from different locations around the world where I fantasize that I might live to step outside and see the skies come rolling in.

Sunsets

On the bus from Seattle to Vancouver, I had the good fortune to sit in the front row and watch the countryside, so different from the East Coast I am accustomed to seeing. On either side, there were huge pine trees, on the right hand side growing among the rocky terrain. Occasionally, we sped past a waterfall and I, the blase city girl, found myself gasping in delight.

The bus rounded a bend, and suddenly the large sky reappeared in so many shades of yellow, pink, orange, green, purple, with white and gray and navy clouds. I stopped reading for a while to enjoy the simple picture presented by the sun setting. Which is when, the conductor suddenly said: "If you painted it just like that, no one would believe it was real".

She is right in part because it was so pretty. But it also made me think that she should put it in those terms. I was struck, again and only because it was in such an unexpected context, that there is an expectation of truthfulness in art. Now of course, if it is too realistically painted, the questions can become, why bother? There is photography. But if it does not correlate to the viewer's personal vision of reality than the picture deceives. Interestingly, and as the bus conductor so rightly pointed out, if it is realistic it is least likely to accepted as such.

Turner Sunset c. 1830-5

Oscar Wilde once joked that Turner invented sunsets, meaning of course that we would never recover from the influence of his pictures of sunsets. Certainly, the vivid colors of his paintings seem the epitome of the sunset, and a sunset must somehow be as orange to be accepted as glorious. We can't escape the influence of others. They are there in the fragile neural connections of our mind. Traveling, however, can sometimes shift the comfortable state we have cultivated and a simple remark can lead to new thoughts.

I never notice sunsets at home because I am too busy, or so I thought. I am not sure that I see it that way now. Traveling today reminded me that I don't need to (not) see things the way I have, or others do. But if I want to keep seeing things for myself, then I will likely have to stay open to a surprise. A surprise that may scintillate but is as likely to disenchant, because a truly personal vision is not always a pretty one.