Studio Saturday - the colour of the sky

"Mornings like these"... a misremembered line in a poem by Annie Dillard ....

A billion chances—and I am here!

And here I lie in the quiet room
And read and read and read.
So easy—so easy—so easy.

You guessed it, not much going on the ceramics studio or in the sewing studio this week. Paralysis? not really - lots else on, things getting in the way. Enjoying the moment. Hatching plans, vague plans at the moment...

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And every morning I photograph the sky -

May 4th

May 5th

May 6th

May 7th

May 8th

May 9th

May 10th

May 11th

Is it part of my art practice? Er, probably not, just an obsession, but it has an arty origin. Long ago, in pre-digital days, a student at the Royal College of Art set up a camera to take a circular photo of the same patch of sky at the same time every day. The work was presented as a grid of circles, showing how the colour of the sky - or the cloud cover - varied. 

Of course the camera, film, and processing contributed to the result. I didn't realise that at the time. Now my thinking about the piece goes round and round in circles about whether this (inaccurate) record of "the colour of air" is any "better" than our memory (or preconception) of the colour of the sky. 

And now that I write about it, Tim Ingold's book "Being Alive" comes to mind - he has a section about the sky, weather, climate...

8. The shape of the earth

9. Earth, sky, wind and weather

10. Landscape or weather-world?

Forty pages requiring urgent re-reading.

Somewhere in those pages, with bearing on "colour of air, colour of sky", is Ingold's account of the ancient conception of the sky as a bubble around the earth, as a specific place with a boundary. Whereas we now know, don't we, that "the sky" has named layers (eg stratosphere) and the air becomes less dense the further up you go, right into deep space, where there's perhaps one atom in a cubic metre...

Also for re-reading, Ingold's book "Lines", which has lots of info on writing, drawing, music, mapping - fascinating, not so much for the info as for the framework, Ingold's way of thinking about these things.