What do clouds and ballerinas have in common? Bryan explores that question with a trip to the Yale Center for British Art. Then, Jesse introduces us to the scientist with his head in the clouds who helped revolutionize the way painters depicted the sky.
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Links:
Turner’s landscapes at the Yale Center for British Art
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1667701Constable’s cloud studies at the Yale Center for British Art
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1670757Degas’ ballerinas
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/degas-and-his-dancers-79455990/How do clouds float?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-clouds-float-when/Luke Howard, the man who named the clouds
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1256/wea.157.02The volcanic eruption of 1783
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2015/06/08/this-1783-volcanic-eruption-changed-the-course-of-history/#53fde2b353c8Luke Howard’s cloud art
http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/browse/issue-02/made-real/luke-howard-s-clouds-and-the-persistence-of-convention/Music in this episode by Alan Piljak, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions, and Return to Normal. All music courtesy the Free Music Archive.
Our theme song is “Silver Moon” by The Columbians, from the Internet Archive.
Episode Transcript:
Bryan
0:20 Hi everyone, welcome to Truth and Beauty. I'm Bryan.
Jesse
0:23 And I'm Jesse. We're bringing you conversations about the world between an astrophysicist who can't draw
Bryan
0:28 and an artist who dropped out of high school.
Bryan
0:45 We went to the art museum this week. Didn't we?
Jesse
0:48 Yeah, we did. It was really fun.
Bryan
0:50 Yeah. So we are lucky enough to have the Yale Center for British Art in our hometown of New Haven where we're recording right now. And we went over there to look at some paintings by J. M. W. Turner. So a little background on him: Joseph Turner was born in 1775 and was part of the Romantic movement which emphasized dramatic emotion and the spiritual power of nature. So throughout his life Turner focused mainly on landscapes and seascapes, which might sound pretty dull, but I mean, you saw these. What did you think?
Jesse
1:23 I thought they were epic. Yeah, they were so cool. There are these crazy oceans, these waves, and the clouds were pretty incredible too...
Bryan
1:47 Look at how much of each composition the sky takes up. It's like two-thirds of the composition.
Jesse
1:54 That's really interesting. Yeah, most of these ... I mean, there's some smaller ones.
Jesse
1:59 landscape, but
Bryan
1:59 Those aren't by Turner.
Jesse
2:00 Oh, really?
Bryan
2:01 Yes. So Turner was known for his seascapes. So let's go look at these clouds.
Bryan
2:08 How long do you think it takes for a cloud like this to become a different cloud, to stop looking like that? Imagine you're lying on the ground, looking up at a cloud.
Jesse
2:17 Yeah, like 10 minutes.
Bryan
2:19 And how long do you think it took to paint this?
Jesse
2:21 Like 10 minutes?
Jesse
2:24 Like this whole painting?
Bryan
2:25 Yeah, this whole painting.
Jesse
2:26 It would take me weeks to paint.
Bryan
2:28 And how big is this painting?
Jesse
2:31 Six feet across and four feet tall.
Bryan
2:33 So the perspective of the painting is as though you're sitting on the water, looking at these ships. The people on those ships are above the viewer. Do you see what I mean? It's like you're down on the water.
Jesse
2:47 Yeah, it's very much a duck's-eye view.
Bryan
2:50 What I'm trying to communicate is that these clouds, which are very much a moment in time, the size of the piece, and the perspective of the piece mean that he couldn't have done this on location.
Jesse
2:59 Oh yeah, no way. He wasn't sitting out there with a canvas on his little raft.
Bryan
3:03 Yeah, it's just impossible. And another reason that we know he didn't do this on location is if you look at the date...
Jesse
3:12 1818.
Bryan
3:12 This was before oil paints came in tubes. Artists had to mix their own oil paints in their studios. They didn't have portable tubes of oil paint. They didn't have pre-mixed pigments. You've seen those powders in museums, you know, this really musty yellow color. And you mix that together with different solvents and you create your own pigments.
Jesse
3:32 Oh, wow. So that was a lot of work. You couldn't do that in the field very easily.
Bryan
3:37 No, all these artists who have oil paintings, they would go out, and they would create all these watercolor studies, and then they would translate them into oil paintings.
Bryan
3:55 Turner was obsessed with storms. There's actually a story that he tells. It's to be taken with a grain of salt, but in his old age, apparently, he asked some sailors to lash him to a ship's mast during a storm.
Jesse
4:11 What!?
Bryan
4:11 So he says that he stayed there for four hours and was just in the thick of the storm. He says, "I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did".
Jesse
4:24 What!?
Bryan
4:25 So then he painted this crazy seascape, which just looks like you're falling down a well and looking up at the sky. It's just a vortex of mist. But apparently, that's what he experienced on the ship.
Jesse
4:37 This is like Odysseus, isn't that what happened to him?
Bryan
4:40 Yeah.
Jesse
4:40 But in Turner's case, it was because he just wanted to watch the storm. Why did he need to be tied to the mast?
Bryan
4:47 I think he's trying to say that he's committed to accurately representing reality, which he was. Turner painted the same thing throughout his entire life: variations on landscapes and seascapes. And that involved sitting and looking at the sea for hours and hours and hours for his whole life. He had an incredibly long and prolific career. He made hundreds of paintings and they're all of nature, which is a big part of this romantic movement. He was so committed to accuracy. Oh, we talked about this in the museum...
Bryan
5:20 If you look at this one by Turner, also, you can barely see what anything is.
Jesse
5:25 Yeah. It looks like a dream. Yeah, this is totally different, really foggy.
Bryan
5:32 Meteorologists have studied over 500 paintings by artists, including Turner. They are able to tell if the paintings were done before, during, or after volcanic eruptions just because of the haze that's in the paintings.
Jesse
5:47 What?!
Bryan
5:48 They can also trace the development of pollution over the centuries based on paintings from the past, because we didn't even have photography back when a lot of these paintings were made, especially not color photography. So we can use them to trace how the skies have changed, because they're so accurate.
Jesse
6:04 Oh, that's so interesting. So like, you can look at paintings of London over hundreds of years and then that's how you know how much smog the factories were putting out?
Bryan
6:10 Yeah!
Jesse
6:22 But I still want to know, why did he strap himself to the ship?
Bryan
6:26 The thing is that nowadays, we have access to all these amazing images. You follow Nat Geo on Instagram and you get these crazy nature pictures. We're so used to just seeing things that happen all over the world in all sorts of weather conditions. And we would never have seen those otherwise, if photography hadn't existed. At this time, you couldn't take a camera out into a storm and take a photo of it from a ship, especially not color photography. In order to capture these experiences that many people had experienced, but probably not painters (because if you think about it, sailors aren't the ones going back and making oil paintings). In order to capture these experiences, they needed an artist to go out to live them and then to interpret them.
Jesse
7:09 So the fact that he wanted to be there at all was so that he could then paint it realistically afterwards?
Bryan
7:14 Yeah, because nobody had painted the point of view of being in a storm, because nobody brings a canvas or a piece of paper out to a storm and sketches it.
Jesse
7:24 Oh, I see. Okay. He wanted to sear that memory into his brain so he had to stay out there for a few hours.
Bryan
7:30 Yeah! Just as the romantic movement was ending in the late 1800s, this is about when Turner died, Impressionism arrived and brought with it all sorts of new attitudes about painting. One major difference was, as I mentioned before, oil paints became portable, so painters could complete their work on site. This meant that the creative process could be shortened. Artists could go straight to the canvas, instead of doing hundreds of sketches, noting down all the right colors, and then putting it together inside a studio later on. This might seem a lot more convenient, just having your paints. You can go out to the scene. You can just paint what you're seeing. You don't have to remember it all. But there actually are artists who insist that something is lost when you simply paint what you see instead of thinking it through.
Bryan
8:13 Now, you know Degas?
Jesse
8:15 Yeah, he's the ballerina guy.
Bryan
8:16 Yes, exactly. The ballerina guy. He was just fascinated by them. He would go to these performances and then he managed to convince people to let him in.
Jesse
8:27 So, ballerinas were like the rock stars of their time, right?
Bryan
8:31 Yeah.
Jesse
8:31 Ballet dancers are kind of a niche right now.
Bryan
8:34 That's the crazy thing. Certain ticket holders actually would get passes to go backstage. And so he would write to his friends, saying, "will you give me your pass so I can go back and sketch the girls?"
Jesse
8:44 So when he went backstage, and he was hanging out with the ballerinas, is that when he would paint the ballerinas?
Bryan
8:49 Yeah, so even though oil paints were portable at this time, and a lot of his friends did paint outside, he couldn't exactly bring his whole setup into these dance studios. He was barely allowed in to look at the girls. That was already a strange enough request.
Jesse
9:04 Yeah, seriously!
Bryan
9:05 Yeah, so he couldn't set up his easel and bring all his paints in there. Also, you needed a lot of ventilation. The paints we have now are not nearly as toxic as they used to be.
Jesse
9:14 Yeah, like he was gonna kill all the ballerinas. I can imagine the headline.
Bryan
9:17 So, he would just go in with a sketch pad. He produced thousands of sketches, kind of like Turner. And he would go back to the studio and try to put them all together. The bigger problem was that - think about it - dancers, like clouds, are constantly in motion. All these paintings, if you look at them, each girl is doing some dynamic stretch or twirl. There's absolutely no way he got a whole room full of antsy, young ballerinas to stay still for the hours and hours and hours it took to paint it. He would do sketches. He would actually have some of the girls come and model for him in his studio and put it all together.
Bryan
9:53 So what you're seeing is a collage that's gone through his memory, that's been transformed by his imagination. That's what he thought was most important for art, not just looking at it. He actually ridiculed his contemporaries who insisted on going out into nature and bringing their canvases. There's this movie I watched about Gauguin. He's just hiking through the hills carrying his canvas on his back and stumbling over rocks to paint outside. Degas thought that was ridiculous. This was his life's mission: to convince everyone that this was silly, that this whole plein air painting thing was ridiculous. Because the true role of the artist is to use his mind, his imagination, and his memory, not just his eyes.
Jesse
10:39 Yeah, I mean I was just thinking. It's hard enough to get kids to stay still for a photograph today.
Bryan
10:46 Yeah. And nature is like that as well. You can't actually capture something in the moment because everything changes.
Jesse
10:53 Yeah, that's why I like still lifes.
Bryan
10:55 Yes! We've actually painted a few still lives. Jesse and I, we take out our easels at home and we paint oranges and pears.
Jesse
11:02 Yeah, and the best part is: nothing moves!
Bryan
11:04 That's true. And we actually do it at night, so the light doesn't even change from outside. We don't even have natural light shifting across the forms.
Bryan
11:13 Degas and Turner, they were both tasked with this condensing of all these images, and memories, and colors that they'd recorded into one unified image. But Degas didn't see this as an obstacle to creativity. Instead, he saw it as the source of it. To him, that period of time in between looking at something and rendering it was where all the magic happened. So that was the difference between any old person who has a set of eyes and an artist.
Bryan
11:44 He wrote in a letter, "To draw what sticks in the memory is a process in which fancy collaborates with memory. Only what really impressed one, only what is essential, is set down". He wrote this to a friend of his who loved painting from life. He wrote this to convince him that when you think about something, when you process it, when you recall it, when you look back at your sketches, you are performing a creative act before your paintbrush even touches canvas.
Jesse
12:22 Hey everyone! We started Truth and Beauty as a way to share the stories we've come across in our work. Because this is a brand new podcast, it would mean so much to us if you took a second to rate and review.
Bryan
12:32 Yeah! At this point, any feedback would actually make a big difference to us. That's how other people find our show.
Bryan
12:38 You can also check us out on Instagram @truthandbeautypod where we'll be posting visual show notes and behind-the-scenes photos.
Bryan
12:45 Here's Jesse to tell us how scientists first made sense of the clouds.
Jesse
12:51 So Bryan, did you ever lie out on the grass when you were a kid and look up at the clouds?
Bryan
12:57 Yeah, I love that. Finding the shapes.
Jesse
13:00 Do you remember any of the shapes that you would see in the cloud?
Bryan
13:02 I feel like, every time I looked up, I saw a duck. What did you see?
Jesse
13:06 I would often see airplanes. Maybe just because of the context, I would see airplanes flying through the...
Bryan
13:11 You're expecting to see it.
Jesse
13:12 So when you're looking at the clouds, have you ever wondered how they stay up in the sky?
Bryan
13:18 I sort of imagined, it's like when you're in a greenhouse, and it's so humid in the air, you feel like you're breathing in water, like someone just sprayed a spray bottle of water in the air. And it's all misty, I imagine that that's what it's like inside a cloud. And that can kind of be suspended in air.
Jesse
13:38 So you're describing water vapor, water in its gas form. But what's the difference between humid air in a greenhouse and a cloud in the sky?
Bryan
13:46 Well, when you're standing in a greenhouse, you can see right through the air, and I feel like at least from a planes perspective, when I'm flying over them, the clouds look more opaque.
Jesse
13:59 Yeah, they're white! Clouds are white. Clouds are white because they're full of water. They're full of liquid droplets of water. And if you have enough drops of water, light, as it enters the cloud, gets scattered all around. And once it makes it out, it's no longer the color it was, it's every color in the rainbow. It's white. That's why clouds look white. They're opaque because they're full of, literally full, of tons - tons! - of water. Liquid water.
Bryan
14:25 How are they full of liquid water? I thought it was in gas form.
Jesse
14:28 Well, what happens when the cloud stops being a cloud?
Bryan
14:31 I thought in that moment, the gas begins turning into liquid. I didn't realize there was liquid just hanging out there like a water balloon.
Jesse
14:38 There is! There is there's...
Bryan
14:39 What? Where is it!?
Jesse
14:41 There's hundreds of tons.
Bryan
14:43 But you can fly through them.
Jesse
14:45 Yeah, they're very small droplets. How do all those hundreds of tons of water stay up? So the droplets in the cloud are so small, they're really falling. They are falling just like anything. But because they're so tiny. They fall really slowly.
Jesse
15:00 So actually, if you work out how long it takes a drop of water inside of a cloud to fall from the top to the bottom, it will take a few weeks.
Bryan
15:08 No way! How tall are clouds in terms of buildings?
Jesse
15:13 The size of a building maybe?
Bryan
15:15 But if you poured water from the top of the building to the bottom of it, it would only take a couple seconds to reach the bottom. So why does it take a few weeks?
Jesse
15:26 What would fall more slowly?
Bryan
15:27 A feather.
Jesse
15:28 A feather, exactly. Right. So a feather is fluffy. It feels the air resistance a lot more. So with drops of water, as you get to a smaller and smaller drop, it feels more air resistance so it falls more slowly. So have you ever seen in a sunbeam those little bits of dust flying around?
Bryan
15:49 Yeah.
Jesse
15:50 So those are particles of dust. They're being pulled to the ground by gravity, but because they're so tiny, little currents in the air are enough to keep them floating.
Jesse
16:03 What happens when rain forms? Well, these drops get bigger and bigger. And eventually, they reach a point where they're no longer held up by the movements of air, and they fall out of the cloud.
Jesse
16:21 So do you remember the scientific names for different types of clouds?
Bryan
16:24 Yeah, I was actually drawing clouds the other week. So I know a few. I know nimbus, cumulus...
Jesse
16:34 Yeah?
Bryan
16:36 There are a lot more. There was a long list...
Jesse
16:38 There a lot more. I'm going to tell you the story of the man who named the clouds.
Jesse
16:48 Luke Howard was a daydreamer. He was the son of a wealthy English family, and he was sent to boarding school in 1780. But instead of focusing on math class, he preferred to gaze out the window at the clouds rolling over the English countryside. That's something I can definitely relate to.
Bryan
17:07 Unfortunately, I didn't live in such a scenic environment. I had a parking lot to look out at.
Jesse
17:14 So when Howard was 11 years old, a giant volcanic eruption on Iceland spread a layer of ash all over England. Do you remember the Icelandic volcano a few years ago?
Bryan
17:26 Yes. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was a big deal.
Jesse
17:30 This volcano was a lot bigger. So this eruption triggered brutally cold winters in Europe which killed a fifth of Iceland's population. And some say it even caused the French Revolution. Have you heard about this?
Bryan
17:45 No, I had no idea. So was it significantly colder then?
Jesse
17:50 Yeah, for years afterwards. Because of this layer of smoke and ash in the atmosphere all over Europe, the whole climate cooled down.
Bryan
18:00 What was their heating like at the time? They certainly didn't have electric heating. They were burning wood...
Jesse
18:09 Certainly not. This was 1780. So...
Bryan
18:11 Oh my God, they must have been freezing!
Jesse
18:13 Certainly a tragedy at the time. But a more beautiful result of this eruption was that all of that smoke in the air made for some incredible sunsets.
Bryan
18:21 Oh yeah! That's what I was reading about with those meteorologists ... that it makes the sky redder, which amplifies the sunsets somehow? I don't know, you obviously know more about that.
Jesse
18:33 Yeah. So when you have a bunch of smoke, dust, or particles of stuff in the air, light coming from the sun will refract off of those particles and the blue light goes away, it scatters away, and you only see the red light coming through. So that's why sunsets are red and that's why if you have some impurities in the atmosphere, like volcanic ash...
Bryan
18:55 ...or pollution...
Jesse
18:56 ...or pollution, you can get even more spectacular sunsets. These sunsets so impressed a young Howard that he would forever have his head in the clouds. After school, he was sent by his family to apprentice as a pharmacist, but he preferred to dabble in his scientific hobby. Luckily, he was soon commuting long distances to and from a lab in the east of London. Back then, back before podcasts were invented, commuters had to find other ways to pass the time. Luke Howard gazed at the clouds.
Jesse
19:28 When Howard was 24, he co-founded a club to pursue his intellectual interests with other Londoners. But to be part of this club, you had to present original papers for discussion. Otherwise, you'd actually be fined.
Bryan
19:43 Oh, so it's like our dinner parties where, if you don't bring a dish, then you have to pay.
Jesse
19:48 Exactly! There was this incentive...
Bryan
19:50 ...and everybody wants to be in a club. Everybody secret desire is to just be a part of something.
Jesse
19:56 So, maybe it was this financial incentive which pushed Howard to present his "Essay on the Modification of Clouds". Before Howard, the prevailing wisdom was that clouds were all unique and temporary. After his years of painstaking observations, he noticed that clouds seem to come in three main shapes. Do you know what these shapes are?
Bryan
20:17 Okay. I think they're, um, cumulus...
Jesse
20:21 ....cumulus: convex or conical heaps. That's how he described them.
Bryan
20:26 Cirrus.
Jesse
20:27 Yes, cirrus: these wispy, fibrous clouds.
Bryan
20:31 ...and stratus.
Jesse
20:33 Exactly!
Bryan
20:34 Yes! Oh my god, I'm so proud of myself.
Jesse
20:36 Stratus are the ones that are like layers, right, they're these long continuous horizontal sheets.
Bryan
20:42 Can I just say that it's funny that we're doing this episode because I embarked on this project of drawing all the types of the clouds a few weeks ago. And I stopped because they were too hard to draw. So now, we're talking about defining the clouds, categorizing them, and the process of painting them. And I can tell you from experience it is very difficult because they're so nebulous. You can't tell where the edges are. You can't tell where the sky ends and the cloud begins.
Jesse
21:10 Yeah, and this was why it was so difficult to get a scientific handle on clouds for so long. Because first of all, every individual cloud looks different, right? I mean, some of them look like ducks, some of them look like airplanes to me. You can look up at the sky and see what you want to see in the clouds. And also they're always changing. So, how do you really put an objective definition on the clouds?
Jesse
21:34 These three basic types are still the types we use today, as you mentioned. 200 years later, after Howard came up with these names, we're still using them! These three basic types, they can be mixed together. And of course, we now know there are other types of clouds like lenticular clouds, which form over mountains. But Howard's system was a massive improvement over the cloud descriptions of his day.
Jesse
21:57 So some of the terms that people used were "mare's tails" and "mackerel skies". These really vague terms.
Bryan
22:05 Those are beautifully poetic, sort of fairy tale...
Jesse
22:08 ...but you can imagine the problem if you want to say "there's a storm brewing" or something and you said, "oh, there was a fluffy bunny rabbit cloud"...
Bryan
22:15 They'd probably know exactly what you're talking about!
Jesse
22:17 Okay, maybe.
Jesse
22:26 So Howard's work didn't just rock the meteorology world. Many art historians argue that the landscape painters of the early 19th century were directly influenced by this new cloud science. The painter John Constable was especially keen to study the cloud forms. He produced a series of paintings of clouds just a few years after Howard's paper, which were unlike any that had come before. We looked at these paintings in the museum!
Bryan
22:52 Yeah, and they're just clouds! There's a whole cluster of them at the Center for British Art. It's a whole wall of just cloud studies and honestly, they're beautiful. I would hang them in my house.
Jesse
23:05 Yeah, they're masterpieces.
Bryan
23:07 Yeah.
Jesse
23:07 And Constable, this painter, he was obsessed with clouds, obviously. He painted them over and over and over. And in the margins of his notebook at the time, we actually have references to a brand new scientific term: cumulus.
Bryan
23:23 So that's how we know that he had direct contact with it.
Jesse
23:27 Yeah, he was reading this new cloud science. And he was using that to better depict the clouds in his paintings.
Bryan
23:34 That's commitment!
Jesse
23:35 So I just think this is fascinating that an artist could be on this cutting edge of scientific thought and really using brand new science.
Bryan
23:42 We use our brains too!
Bryan
23:44 Well, we've talked about how scientists and artists were one in the same. So, think about Da Vinci. He learned all about anatomy just from drawing it, and he was a master artist. But he learned new things that we didn't know before. Astronomers - you've told me before that astronomers looked through telescopes and they couldn't just take a photo. They had to draw what they were seeing. And I love that those roles were combined, because, of course, they're very disparate right now. I would not be at home with your colleagues.
Jesse
24:21 Yeah, exactly! I mean, before photography was invented, pretty much every scientist had to be an artist. So actually, Luke Howard, this cloud scientist made beautiful sketches of clouds himself! Every scientist was an artist, and many great artists were also great scientists.
Jesse
24:40 You may wonder why I'm telling you so much about science that's 200 years old, since we now understand much of the physics behind cloud formation and structure. I like the story of Howard's clouds because it shows how we can make sense of a seemingly nebulous, temporary, ever changing world. If science could bring order to the chaotic tumble of clouds overhead, what else could science do?
Jesse
25:17 Truth and Beauty is produced in Baobab Tree Studios in downtown New Haven, Connecticut and edited by Bryan and Jesse.
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