Painting SKIES

I still recall, with a shudder, overhearing a conversation between two students on a painting course when one confidently informed the other “I never bother about planning the sky when painting a landscape, it’s just the blue bit at the top of the painting”. When one considers that the conversation was taking place near Flatford Mill in Suffolk, on the very spot beside the River Stour where The Hay Wain was painted almost 200 years ago by one of this country’s most accomplished painters of skies, John Constable, you might understand my shudder. Skies are so much more than simply the “bit at the top”.

Skies are an essential element of a landscape or seascape, and an artist