Rainbow

Thursday, 10th June 2004
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

7.45 pm: I'm sitting with a mug of coffee at the patio table, painting a subtle sky - all plums and parchments. A rainbow materialises, slashed across my chosen square of sky. It's at once the purest blaze of colour yet teasingly enigmatic; dematerialsing then beaming back a few minutes later, like the smile of a Cheshire cat.

First I'm painting in stripes, then I'm blotting them out again; my mixed up attempts to include this now-you-see-it-now-you-don't phantom end in it appearing more like a three-lane highway to heaven than an optical phenomenom.

I've made it look like something that would show up on radar and be declared a hazard to aviation.

Cumulus 8.15 p.m. I sketch the squadron of cumulus (above) which is heading north, below cirrus. A huge field of dappled altocumulus clouds, like a cheetah's spots, appears directly overhead but soon dissolves away again.

Cirrus The sky is changing every few minutes: Before I've finished painting the high cirrus (right) it has melted away and a more dramatic, ragged clump of cumulus trundles in from the south. I start adding this in the lower right corner but really it doesn't belong with the cirrus I've just sketched: it's part of another sky.

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk