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This year’s clouds

Yesterday evening I went to hear Richard Hamblyn talking about his book Extraordinary Clouds, in which he presents photographs and descriptions of unusual natural and man-made cloud formations: the ones which did not make his earlier book on cloud classification, The Cloud Book. The talk was part of the Birmingham Book Festival and was introduced by Edward Morris whose book Constable’s Clouds, which examines clouds in art, is unfortunately out of print. Types of cloud covered included enormous lenticular clouds and sonic boom clouds, and the talk was illustrated with some amazing photographs from Hamblyn’s book, including ones taken from inside the eye of Hurricane Katrina, and satellite images of thousands of contrails over areas of the USA, and indeed the theme of man’s impact on the skies was returned to several times during the evening.

Another theme of discussion was that of the depiction of clouds in art, and whether artists such as Turner and Monet painted the actual skies that they ‘saw’, and could their works therefore be used as accurate record of past skies. This was very interesting when considered alongside the decisions Hamblyn told us he had to take regarding the exclusion from the book of photographs which may have been ‘photoshopped’ or with otherwise dubious provenance. Of course anyone who has tried either to draw or photograph clouds will know that what we see up there often doesn’t appear in the same way when it is ‘captured’.

Many interesting visual and other phenomena were discussed alongside clouds during the question-and-answer session, including the Brocken Spectre, in which one sees a solitary figure envelpoped in a kind of rainbow-halo suspended in the air. The phenomena gave rise to a legend mentioned in Confessions of an Opium Eater and elsewhere, and is said to be peculiarly eerie since even if one is standing within a group of people one only sees one ‘spectre’. This is because, as was explained to us, each person creates one’s own spectre in the mind, in the same way as ‘we all create our own rainbows’. At which point Edward Morris pointed out that the entire daytime sky is one large ‘optical effect’ and that we only return to ‘reality’ at night-time, which I found to be a very interesting statement and has had me pondering ever since he said it.

The whole evening was very thought-provoking and interesting and in the absence of photographs of any ‘extraordinary’ clouds, I’m going to illustrate this post with photographs of some of the skies I’ve seen from my studio this past summer, which has been a wonderful one for cloud-watchers like me: