All Cloudy, except a Narrow Opening at the Bottom of the Sky

A Schematic Cloud Study, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate, shared under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

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Favorites,

It’s a pleasure to be tap-tapping another email to you: what a fun thing you’ve signed up for!

I just finished about three months of watching and reading slow, early-1900s British aristocratic countryside dramas (sometimes with a beautiful gay romance simmering just above the subtext). I especially recommend the exhaustive eleven-part ‘80s Brideshead Revisited adaptation (free; use an ad blocker) and Serpents in Eden, a collection of short crime fiction (less hot, still fun).

A really slow burn like Brideshead or Merchant Ivory’s E.M. Forster adaptation Maurice lets you settle into a kind of fantasy that, at its best, can work like hyperindulgent meditation. I started wondering: if I didn’t need to work, how would I spend all my time? What is truly pleasurable to me right now? A surprisingly useful exercise.

Like Brideshead’s Charles and Sebastian having champagne and strawberries under a tree, there are days I just want to look up at the sky and live. I was thinking about how best to share that feeling with you and remembered how much I’d been enjoying the British landscape painter Alexander Cozens’ (1717–1786) drawings of clouds.

Some are gorgeous, technical documentary sketches, but my favorites are spare studies consisting of just a few lines.

A Schematic Cloud Study, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

A Schematic Cloud Study, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

A Schematic Cloud Study, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

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Cozens' hatching work on the bigger drawings and etchings is gorgeous, sometimes barely there. Captions in his script offer clunky, accidentally poetic descriptions that have become the etchings' de facto titles. He taught drawing and wrote extensively about it: I think his stabs at alt-text are as instructional as they are a part of his process, encouraging you to think of drawing as a way of naming your experiences.

Half Cloud Half Plain, the Clouds Lighter than the Plain Part, and Darker at the Top than the Bottom. The Tint Twice Over in the Plain Part, and Once in the Clouds, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

All Cloudy, except a Narrow Opening at the Bottom of the Sky, with Others Smaller, the Clouds Lighter than the Plain Part, and Darker at the Top than the Bottom. The Tint Twice in the Openings, and Once in the Clouds, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

Streaky Clouds at the Bottom of the Sky, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

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A couple good graphite-only landscapes with clouds:

A Cliff to Left, Valley with Castles and Mountains Beyond. Schematic Clouds, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

Intermixture of the Sky with the Landscape, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

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And finally some showboats with watercolor added to dramatic effect:

The Cloud, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

Study of Sky No. 4 with Landscape, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

A Wooded Hill Top, with Thunder Clouds, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

Study of Sky, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate

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More over at the Tate's website. All of the above images were shared under this wonderful Creative Commons license.

A bonus for cloud art heads: Cory Arcangel’s "Super Mario Clouds" (2002), in which Arcangel famously removed all of the code from an original Super Mario Bros cartridge, except for the clouds floating through the sky.

Oh and if you never think about rich, waifish Brits again, at least enjoy Brideshead’s Anthony Blanche downing four Brandy Alexanders. (“Down the little red lane they go. How the students stare!”)

love,

alex

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