French Cloudscape Hardcover Journal — Matte Sky Art Notebook for Writing & Reflection

The sky over France — over Provence particularly — has been a subject of sustained painterly attention since at least the seventeenth century. It is not the same sky everywhere: the light above the Val d’Oise, pale and diffuse, is entirely different from the midsummer sky of the Luberon, which operates in a register of blue so saturated as to seem almost theatrical. Painters have always known this. The cloudscape on this journal’s cover belongs to that tradition of close looking — a sky recorded at the moment of its greatest interest, when the clouds build and shift and the light between them takes on the quality of something deliberate.

There is a long French tradition of plein air sky study — from the Barbizon painters who worked the forests of Fontainebleau outward to the skies above them, to the Impressionists who understood atmosphere as the real subject of landscape painting. Études de ciel, the studies were called: exercises in attention, in the discipline of observing exactly what one sees rather than what one expects to see. This journal carries that spirit in its cover.

For those who travel to France and find themselves stopping on some provincial road to look up at what the light is doing, this journal will feel immediately right.