Referenced from Alain De Botton' great book The Art of Travel:
'John Ruskin was born in London in February 1819. A central part of his work was to pivot around the question of how we can possess the beauty of places.' (De Botton, p.219)
Ruskin's father was a wealthy sherry importer and allowed hs son to follow his artistic and literary leanings.
Ruskin used words and pictures to define his capture of beauty and was well known for publishing works on the art of drawing and teaching drawing to the working class in London. This was not so much as to create artists amongst tradespeople, but to have them look at nature in detail to enrich their lives.
'My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to make him happier as a carpenter.' (ibid, p.221)
Ruskin, even in Victorian England, was concerned that the pace of life robbed people of the time and desire to see details - hence his focus on drawing and the time and intense concentration needed to sketch even a simple tree. By Ruskin's estimate this required at least ten minutes, while even the prettiest tree would engage the observation of most folk for only a minute or so.
The sky was also a focus for him, its ever changing nature harbouring sensory delights that everyone might enjoy - should they take the time to look and have the tools of perception need to analyse what they saw.
'Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves.' (ibid, p. 233)
Ruskin boasted that he bottled skies as carefully as his father bottled sherry. He painted his word pictures to capture the psychological importance of what we see rather than purely the physical presence of what is observed.
Nature's most common, everchanging and majestic show, the cloud formations overhead, are usually lost to us - at least as adults. A child might lie on its back, look at the sky and feel the surge of nature's power as the clouds make pictures that move and morph overhead. An adult glances up at the same and notes, 'No rain today', and moves on. In gazing at and through the sky we see and sense the power and beauty of our world and how that resonates within us.
Perhaps we should all attempt a little of Ruskin's sky bottling.
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