All This Useless Beauty

As I sat sweltering under an ancient Elder tree on a startlingly bright July morning in Calderdale, I took a sip of water and looked down at the confused mess in my sketchbook and then up at the uninterrupted dome of purest blue sky and thought to myself - this is definitely a case of “all this useless beauty”.

Common Hog Weed flowering in Calderdale. Photograph: Angie Rogers

Useless Beauty or L’Inutile Beauté is a short story by French author Guy de Maupassant which inspired All This Useless Beauty a song by singer songwriter Elvis Costello. Both works reflect philosophically on beauty and transience, on the ideal versus real life.

I have purloined their phrase to describe a more prosaic concern of my own. When the weather is so lovely, the blue sky so perfect, I can’t make good landscape art.

Perhaps you imagine a lovely summer’s day is the ideal time for a landscape artist to work outside and that a successful painting might almost be guaranteed to arrive in such pleasant circumstances?

And yet, speaking purely for myself, this is the worst kind of weather for painting outside, especially moorland.

I like contrast and dynamic skies full of scudding clouds or dark and heavy with rain. I just can’t seem to manage to make an interesting artwork out of uniform blue sky.

It’s not the blueness of the blue, but the lack of contrast. When there is variety in the sky it’s such a pleasure to create a range of blue hues on my palette. I also make swatches of blues and sky colours on long paper strips which I use to remind me later.

Paper swatches of colours used for painting moorland skies and cloudscapes.  Photograph: Angie Rogers

Paint studies of cloudscapes where you can enjoy the blue alongside all those contrasting greys and whites. The neutral colours are so important.  Photograph and paintings: Angie Rogers

To show you just how many varieties of blue pigments for artists there are, here is a page of the index to my artists handbook, showing only from A to N.

From The Artist’s Handbook by Pip Seymour. Photograph: Angie Rogers

By the way, this is a brilliantly useful book for anyone needing to know about the paint pigments used by artists. There is so much in-depth and practical information, I keep it close at hand in my studio and use it all the time.

Of course I’m not serious about beauty being useless and glorious weather is always welcome. Rather than trying to paint the whole landscape you can try zooming-in on the details, the colours and forms of wild flowers, grasses and foliage make wonderful subjects instead.

Alternatively go out walking and enjoy the landscape purely as someone who enjoys nature and relaxing outside. Not having to worry about carrying heavy materials and looking for a good spot is restful and makes a change from working!