Spring, West Bergholt, England
Oil on board, 1830mm x 910mm
Private collection, Auckland, New Zeland.

Background

Mid afternoon, late Spring in the same field as the other West Bergholt paintings. A tractor sprays winter wheat on the far side of the field as the farm manager walks the tramlines to the left. A skip goes to collect rubbish on the road to the right. Planes overhead approach London Stansted from the East. A South Westerly wind blows from the right and away 120º to the left, tearing the clouds. On the right clouds incandesce with light from behind while to the left the sun lights their surfaces from the front. Condensing air churns above as the crop ripples below.

Observational:

I went gliding while working on this picture and found glider pilots are very aware of cloud formations because they reveal the air movements which enable flight. Pilots notice the cloud base, the level at which rising air condenses in the atmosphere. This level is usually a flat plane, and it only takes a little experience to be able to judge its height seen from the ground. In this picture it was between two and three thousand feet.

Artists have often used reference planes to organise perspectival space - as in the chequered floor of a Dutch interior. Used carefully, a cloud base can provide an organising plane in the sky, giving a heightened sense of scale and distance. Calculating like this leads to discoveries. For example the central foreground cloud is about four kilometres away, about two kilometres beyond the horizon. If this cloud fell to earth in the foreground it would easily cover the entire field.

The clouds are of a type called cumulus humilis - flattened slightly at the tops because of a temperature inversion not much higher than the condensation level. There was high pressure warm front approaching.