A dramatic piece of weather in South West Russia, near a village called Okop. I can't find any information about Okop at all, but it looks like a generally well-maintained enough little village with a bus stop at one end, and some pleasantly traditional woodwork on some of the houses. Again, no subversion here.
No sound tracks either, not even the soughing of the wind in the grass. Which I hope you're imagining now.
Compositionally this is virtually a transcription of the original google streetview image source. A wood has been disappeared from the right, and this helped bring out the proximity tension between the cloud's 'snout' and underside, and the silhouetted wood beneath it.
I was in a hurry to get this started, and while rummaging around in my bag of card offcuts in the hope of finding something already primed, I came across a forgotten piece that I'd primed in blue. It must have been from about a decade ago, when I went through a (very) short phase of live cloud window sketching in oil paint. Finding that saved me a lot of time preparing a surface, and it was blue! (Probably Prussian Blue and Flake White) Lucky me!
The paintwork in this piece was kept loose and done fairly efficiently, despite my being a bit conflicted about how to handle the cirrusy bits and the secondary clouds. It's probably ended up a bit more pink in the upper left than I intended - a last-minute desire to make the icy plume emerging from the big cloud a bit more interesting, but I think the exaggerated pink underneath the base and the small clouds to the right is quite rewarding. I'm pleased with the softness of the cumulus, and the glare of the denser white highlights, so let's maybe concentrate on those, if you don't mind.
I'm not at all sure that an actual meteorologist would class this as an actual Cumulonimbus. They – the clouds - are usually towering, giant heaps violently powering up through the atmosphere until their heads flatten and spread out against a freezing layer. This one appears to be freezing – indicated by the cirrus plume – quite low, even within the cumulus itself. It's also very long and narrow – the painting's viewpoint is looking along it. From an alternative view further down the road to the Southeast it appears much more glorious in its full length, with a rainbow giving a bit more scale, and it is made plain just how powerful the wind must be in the upper levels to be ripping the cirrus away from the cumulus like that.
I'll have to leave it a couple of weeks to cure a bit more before varnishing etc, then it'll be handed in to the gallery. This is the last of this year's Small Scales for the Open Eye Gallery, where the show is on-line only. It previews for those with a password on 21st November, and opens on the 22nd for the ordinaires.
It's been nice working on the very small stuff for a while, but it'll be good to get back to working on slightly larger pieces that I don't need to check with a magnifying glass for a change. Maybe due for another eye test and new specs come the new year...