Some of the best architecture in my town is in the summer sky. The upper atmosphere is so artfully styled that you want to grab a camera to capture it before the wind blows it away. An experience in constant energy, the “street” above is definitely fast lane.
Let me count the ways.
One minute, the blue yonder is just that – a cerulean lake, smooth and silent, a backdrop for a street busy with cars and trucks. The next thing you know, the firmament, upstaging the traffic, gathers up its clouds – the dark woolly ones, the silken, the delicate grays - as if they were building blocks, and builds itself a street scene of its own, stately and aloof to the traffic below.
This morning, n the horizon, against a blackening sky, I thought I saw the ceramic cornice of the old courthouse. It was white, like alabaster. I could almost feel its polish. But as I peered at it, I could see a low-laying cloud that the sky had made into a cornice. Some architect, the air!
Oscar Wilde was right: Nature imitates art. Call it the art of cumulism, after the word cumulus, meaning shaped cloud puffs. Cumulus’ towered piles often are topped with capitals and cornices on the order of alpine chateaus. Or their massive pyramidal black brumes form shaggy corridors that conjure up the ruins of some massive temple.
Altostratus clouds, smooth as frosted glass, are masterbuilders that seem to pave the sky in travertine marble. And the mountainously tall cumulonimbus variety forms a metropolis of skyscrapers and tree-covered peaks that outshine any city.
Of course, I’m not the first one to see cities in skies. The poets have the corner on this subject. In “Ode to Liberty,” Shelley wrote of Athens “built from the purple crags and silver towers of battlement clouds.”
And in “When June is Come” Robert Bridges tells us “Watch the sunshot palaces high that the white clouds build in the breezy sky.”
Speaking of bards, it’s odd that the most famous one of all, Shakespeare, saw everything in clouds but buildings. Remember Hamlet telling Polonius he could make out a camel, a weasel and a whale in the stuff of skies? Maybe that’s because he didn’t have skyscrapers for comparison.
While we’re looking up, check out the star of the day, the summer sun, especially when it’s bout to retire for the evening. Here's this architect, burned out and ready to drop, and it runs from one cloud to another, washing each with aurora reds - the footprints of its journey across the sky like a strobic play of light pushing at the night.
No architect can hold a candle to summer’s daystar when it comes to painting the sky at dusk. Nothing in the long history of art can compare to the spiritual content of Old Sol's elaborate, incandescent candlepower at twilight. Picturemaking by this fireball eludes all known processes of painting.
Holman Hunt, a 19th-century English painter, sought to capture the setting sun's color and light by working in a small room with screens and curtains to create dark. Painting by natural light in another part of the room, Hunt peeked into his make-believe edge of night through a hole to render the painting "The Light of the World."
Early photographers also used elaborate methods to capture natural light, purposely wobbling their cameras during exposure so that their images trembled.
But the mighty daystar in the sky around here doesn't have to resort to tricks. It has no need to shake anything to get a vibrating effect. It just rouges everything with a throbbing redness that takes away all sense of place. And in its half-light, clouds above look so dark that you expect thunder.
And when the sun stops painting the sky, Sarasota looks like one big charcoal drawing.
Even when the sun is up for the day, the sky is still the best show in town. Maybe it's because I grew up in Manhattan, where mountains of concrete crowd out such things, but Sarasota's upper atmosphere engrosses like few pictures on exhibition.
One minute, the blue yonder is just that - a cerulean lake, smooth and silent - a backdrop for a landscape busy with flowering. The next thing you know, the sky, upstaging even the showiest plants, gathers up its clouds - the dark and woolly ones, the silken and the delicate grays, as if emptying a closet - and puts on a show.
Once, on the horizon against a blackening sky, I saw a statue. It was white, like alabaster. I could almost feel its polish. It looked like the frenzied animal in George Stubb's famed painting, "Lion Attacking a Horse." But I could see it was a low-lying cloud that the sky had carved into a horse.
Some whittler, the sky.
Once in a while, the shifting mass looks like sand dunes soft against the gray sky in Eugene Boudin's "Normandy Women Spreading Wash on the Beach."
The paintings of romantic painters show up a lot in the Sarasota sky.
My favorite novelists also have seen the light and compared clouds to other things.
In "The Witches of Eastwick," John Updike saw plantlife: "At the base of this cliff of atmosphere, cumulous clouds, moments ago as innocuous as flowers, afloat in a pond, had begun to boil."
In "Karain: A Memory," Joseph Conrad saw animals: "Ragged edges of black clouds peeped over the hills, and invisible thunderstorms circled outside, growing like wild beasts."
It makes you wonder what Conrad and Updike would have written had they visited Sarasota. Everything you can think of shows up in the sky here if you watch it long enough.
Just don't let it know you're expecting anything. That's when the best pictures come on. I saw my long-gone grandfather that way. He was laughing about something, but I wasn't in on the joke. He was just standing on the air, laughing.
