My Lord, What a Mornin'!

There's a wonderful bonus to getting up early.  You get to see the sky at very early morning.  If you get up before dawn, you'll have to plan to miss the morning sky, because you'll be back inside reading the paper or your email as it happens.  If you wake at the first morning light, when you go out you'll see wonders in the sky.

We have been having monsoon weather lately. When I went out at first light, it was obvious that we had had more rain during the night.  Rain is almost too big a word for it, for it falls so quietly, stealthily almost, that I never hear it in bed.  But it had darkened the driveway quite a bit more than yesterday morning's rain did. 

Coming down the front steps, I looked ahead over Richard and Terry's house to see a beautiful storm-streaked sky. As I got past the obstruction of the garage I saw the glory of sunlight and cloud to the east.  Then all the way out to the street to get the paper, I looked  to the west over the Picazos' house to a beautiful looming purplish gray dark mass over the ocean.  I was so newly awake that my vision was reeling with all these light-and-cloud effects.  My fingers and my mind yearned for a paintbox, to start mixing water and gray and purple and blue to form these impressions on a piece of paper.

I guess that's why there are so many bad skies in amateur paintings: we want to capture the uncaptureable and our skills are not up to the task. Or should I say, our practice has not brought us up to the task.  Any time I see a painting with a wonderful sky I study it square by square: There he did thus and so, and there something else. Isolated, their techniques do not make a sky, but put together they have caught some hint of the magnificence that surrounds us. YAZZYBEL