Spring, West Bergholt, England
Oil on board, 1830mm x 910mm
Private collection, Auckland, New Zeland.
lamda print available click here
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, tearing the clouds. Towards the sun
clouds incandesce with light from behind as, away the sun, light
strikes them from from the front. Condensing air churns above. The
crop ripples in the breeze.
For more see "Oak, one
tree, three years, fifty paintings" Princeton Architechtural Press,
2011.
I went gliding while working on this picture. 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 cumulus humilis - flattened slightly at
the top because of a temperature inversion not much higher than the
condensation level.
There was a high pressure warm front approaching.
