Showing posts with label clouds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clouds. Show all posts

Thursday, January 17, 2013

DRAWING CLOUDS

I love to draw shapes that I see in the clouds. Mostly I see animals but I also see things like overturned laundry baskets, ghosts, tanks and tape dispensers. A friend says he always sees beautiful girls. 

I see girls too (above) but usually they're not very beautiful.


You can see all kinds of shapes in clouds. Most of them are silly things. It's a strange fact that the most serious and consequential events in human history probably took place under a sky full of gently drifting pork chops, school buses, kangaroos and pies. 


Sometimes the opposite is true (above): it can happen that nothing of consequence is going on down on the ground but overhead giant battleships race over the horizon to a distant war.


There's something tragic about clouds. They marshal themselves into heroic formations (above) and set out for the horizon with what great purpose, determined to sweep away any obstacle that gets in their path. Sadly most of them are ripped apart before they get there. 

It's amazing how frequently George Washington shows up in the sky. Here's (above) a photo of Washington's head surrounded by flying cats. In a panic Washington thrusts his arms out ahead of him to ward off the cats but they're not to be denied. 


Where I live isn't a good place to draw clouds. Mine is a coastal city where the clouds are often stretched into thin wisps or flattened into massive pancakes. Cumulus are the best clouds to draw and we just don't get enough of them. Jenny, who comments here sometimes, says that's that's a bunch of hooey; she says she sees cumulus all the time when she's out with her horses.

Maybe she's referring to the type of clouds above. Are they cumulus? I'm not sure. They don't immediately suggest anything to me....er...no, wait....hmmmmm, well maybe the clouds on the upper left suggest a ghost chasing a flying beaver....but what about the rest? 


Monday, July 30, 2012

CAVES IN THE CLOUDS / HILARY BRACE


I almost called this post "Hilary Brace: Aviation Artist," but I don't think she thinks of herself that way. Brace claims that she's just drawing imaginary landscapes. Maybe, but what I'm seeing here (below) are cloud caves of the sort that my Dad said pilots used to see. 


My Dad said that he'd seen them, and I see no reason to disbelieve him. Flying as a passenger in commercial airlines I've seen bits and pieces of cloud caves, though they weren't as clear and romantic as Hillary makes them. Commercial jets travel too fast for cave exploration.



Nowadays it's against the law to fly through clouds if they can be avoided. All the traffic makes it too dangerous. My Dad didn't have to worry about that when he was young. There were no cloud laws then. He even flew in open-cockpit biplanes (which were old-fashioned even in his time). Imagine what he must have seen!


My Dad's long gone now. I wish I'd thought to ask him what the caves were like.


I'm guessing that they didn't last long...no more than ten minutes maybe.  After that they'd close up (above), trapping the poor pilot inside. Of course he could fly through the walls to escape.


I wonder what it would have been like to fly through the caves in a thunderstorm. It must have been cold and windy and wet. Maybe there were hailstones. Maybe flashes of lightning illuminated the walls.

Here's (below) a link to a great video of a sputtering lightning flash. Imagine being inside a darkish cloud cave when a bolt like this one appeared.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120723.html


Caves like this (above) remind me of Jules Verne's story, "Robur the Conqueror." I wonder if he imagined his character's giant airship hiding in caverns like this one.


Remember those old film clips that showed barnstormers standing on the wings of planes? I assume they were braced somehow. Imagine what it must have been like to be one of those guys flying through the corridors of a cave in the sky!