Elegy Landscapes by Stanley Plumly

Author:Stanley Plumly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

I have done a good deal of skying.

Curious anachronistic words, “films” and “moving picture,” one of which addresses texture, the other two words, action and structure. Constable sees a picture, sometimes a dark picture, when he is looking up into the Hampstead sky; he sees movement, the filmy wind within the cloud; and he sees the equivalent of the invisible made visible, something beyond vapor. He sees the manifestation of feeling, or what he dubs “sentiment.” (“. . . my skies have not been neglected, though they have often failed in execution, no doubt, from an over-anxiety about them, which alone will destroy that easy appearance which Nature always has in all her movements.”)

Because Constable likes to think of painting as a science, emphasizing actuality over sentimentality, accuracy over generality, address over anywhere, his idea of art as science only seems to contradict the idea that painting is feeling when in fact it is the “science” of observation and the “science” of technique that represent the hard evidence that gives truth to the emotion. Constable’s clouds are real clouds insofar as paint can make them, they are dated and detailed, but they are also investments, brushstroked and imagined. Turner often quotes poetry—both his and otherwise—to try to give some emotional context to a painting or else he sometimes attempts to give everything away in a lengthy, expository title. Constable lives within the frame; his clouds are projections as much or more than they are records. Their ephemeral, local, quixotic nature is, to him, individual. The big towering cumulus types are one day, one way of seeing things; the cirrus, gossamer, mare’s-tail types are another day. Sometimes the clouds resemble worlds, other times ragtag leftover tatters. Either way, they evoke, they imply, they suggest. Cumulus or cirrus, they can be ghostly—they are, most days, emblems of the spirit. “I change, but I cannot die,” writes Shelley in “The Cloud.” Constable may prefer the looming, floating armada types that appear more dramatic, but that is because he wants the sky to enlarge, to grow more vertical, to lift and fill everything in the picture, to dominate even the sun.

Timothy Wilcox, again: “The cloud studies are one area where the painter comes face to face, in a direct way, with the question of how the concept of duration can be represented by a static image.” Constable’s answer to this question is the wind, the effects of wind on the object, be it a tree or a cloud. You cannot paint wind but you can paint what it does. The frames around the cloud studies are intended to present the isolation of this animated moment, this movement within stillness; as such, they are very powerful examples of kinesis within stasis. But why isolate them in the first place as if they were practice when they almost all take on the aspect of finished works? Maria, clearly, in the early 1820s, and in spite of periods of apparent health and regardless of her success at bearing children, is dying—consumption is a long lingering.

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