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The Artist’s
Almanac
August 2006
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Shut, shut the door, good John!
Fatigued I said,
Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead,
The dog-star rages!
- Alexander Pope
February and August
are opposites: cold v. hot; wet v. dry; dark v. light. They sit at
opposite ends of the calendar and are unlike in every way, save one
– they are everybody’s least favorite months.
I speak today for
August. While ponds turn scummy, creeks run dry, flowers look
discouraged and lawns turn brown, this is also the month of green
corn with fresh squash and tomatoes, and, for dessert, peaches,
pears, figs and watermelons. Now is the time for pool parties,
homemade ice cream, iced tea and class reunions.
The brightest star in
winter’s night sky is the dog-star, in the constellation Canis
Major. So bright is it that the ancient Romans thought the earth
received heat from it. In August it rises and sets with the bright
sun and is thus invisible to us. Because it is in conjunction with
the sun the ancients believed it added its heat to that of the sun’s
to broil us now.
Air conditioning has
tamed August, unless we be housepainters or golfers. These days we
do not have to sit outside after supper as I did as a boy with my
father waiting for the window fans to pull the day’s heat from the
house. In those pre-TV days we would sit in lawn chairs in the quiet
night and talk about life and kin. Silences were good then,
punctuated only by the occasional passage of a distant car and the
glow of his daily cigarette as the katydid chorus thrummed the
trees.
Unlike Florida and
Arizona, even our hottest nights in Tennessee are cooler than our
days, and today New York City is 105 degrees - we a mere 95. My
daughter’s friend Jim who has just returned from Kuwait where he
worked out in 135 degrees. He thinks the temperature here is fine.
Hot is relative.
Cloud Study, 1822 – John Constable
The glory of August is
its clouds. While winter has only gray and blue skies with intervals
of cirrus, we now have majestic cumulus boiling up to heaven above.
Mere steam, the cynic reminds us, rising from the hotplate of the
earth. Yet, which of us in a high altitude jet airliner has not
walked amongst these divine castles in their dreams. Clouds are 100%
water, and we 80%. Perhaps that is why we feel more kinship with
them than earth, which is this month mostly dry clods. Man could not
conceive of God without the glory of the skies.
John Constable was the
master painter of clouds. He studied them, and sketched daily. He
once spent and entire summer sketching and painting nothing but
skies. His fellow artist, John Ruskin, son of a London wine
merchant, said Constable bottled clouds as his own father once
bottled wines. Constable would later pour them profusely across his
huge canvases which sparked the impressionist movement in France and
which, even today, astound the world with their fluid images.
August too, is in
motion, from the early days of high windswept skies to those of
inversion, when our hot, still, valley fills with stagnant air and
we can no longer see the blue hills of the ridge to the north. The
numbers and density of fogs and spider webs which now ambush our
morning walks are used by upriver grannies to predict the number
depths of snows. Nobody knows, of course, as nobody keeps score, as
fogs turn to dew, dews to frost, frosts to snows. By then it is
December and Christmas and nobody then can really recall the light
and the heat of August.
Cloud Study with Tree Tops and Buildings - John Constable, 1821
Coming Events
December 2-4, Fine Art
In Brentwood Show and Sale, Brentwood Academy, Brentwood
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