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Friday, April 4, 2014

Wandering Lonely as a Cloud


"You can never be nubilous," [John Constable] told his friend Archdeacon John Fisher in 1823. "I am the man of clouds." - from Slate

Constable did a number of cloud studies, as this one from 1821:


I am not one for the nostalgia of Romanticism, but I love clouds, largely due to a children's book of which I can no longer find any evidence that taught me about cumulus, cumulo-nimbus, stratus, cirrus, and even mythological deities like Zephyr. 

Not much later, the compound photographs of Gustav le Gray were created, layering negatives to make sure both land and sky would be evident in the final image even though they required different exposure times. Le Gray, like Constable, had his own cloud obsession:


If only Icarus had more cloud cover....



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