Volcanic palette, translucent jet streams, passion-fruit paintings ...

Every thought about a volcano giving us a paint box? Bright colours - fiery red, scarlet mineral, vivid orange, incandescent yellows, gloomy greys, rich night azures, cerulean blues, violets, jade .. the palettes used by the artists of two hundred years ago.

Today the Icelandic volcano is giving us grey dusty ash, enveloping parts of Iceland, but my walls here seem to have a light layer – do I need to give them a gentle dust down .. I’ve never thought about dusting my walls before – have you?!

Colour Space Chromaticity diagram

However .. some lucky, or unlucky folk depending on the wait time at the airports, have been given a fiery bonfire show of bright hot orange lava, huge white, silver or near white sparks erupting out of the dark depths below, as their plane took them on an excursion near the volcano, but around the ash cloud.

Iceland Volcano: Lava Explodes from Ice Cap - c/o National Geographic

Or, how was the jet stream observed and logged? Those powerful currents affecting us which race at the edge of our known universe .. but what of the winds rushing around other galaxies, ... there must be higher systems of wind interlinking with our jet stream.

The colours of the planets and the night sky – the pastel pinks and orange shades of Jupiter, or the pale yellows and beiges of Saturn, our own Moon when its creamy orb sits low in the sky, or the red, orange, blue and yellow of the stars above.

Pink-Red Hibiscus rosa-sinensis

Colours have always affected us .. sun yellow for life, green for hope, purple for dignity, white for purity .. we’ve used them depict events, to dye our clothes, to paint our faces from time immemorial .. while in recent times we can see the effect these volcanic clouds have on our earthly colours.

When the huge strato-volcano”Tambora “erupted in 1815 it sent pulverised ash high into the atmosphere, which darkened, cooled and polluted the earth, giving us consequences ranging from the dire – a lowering of temperatures that caused frosts in Italy in June, and snows in Virginia in July – as of 2010 .. what’s different? to spectral sunrises and sunsets.

30 years earlier in 1783 the Icelandic Laki had erupted for eight continuous months causing mayhem across Europe and America – deaths of thousands, frosts in June, acid rains over forests, skin lesions in children, crops famines and the death of millions of cattle and could well have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the French Revolution from the resulting hardship of these conditions.

Incandescent Yellow of Rudbeckia “Prairie Sun” : c/o Mobot.org

These changes were being noted including the beginning of the unusual atmospheric phenomena, recorded in a letter of June 1783 to Sir Joseph Banks, then President of The Royal Society. Krakatoa’s immediate aftermath was a year’s worth of awe-inspiring evening beauty – sunsets of purple, passion-fruit and salmon that had artists around the world trying desperately to capture what they managed to see in the fleeting moments before dark.

William Ascroft (or Ashcroft) one hundred years later (1883) recorded five hundred water colours that he painted, one every ten minutes like a human-film camera, from his Thames-side flat. These skylines, after Krakatoa, show the amber glows with crepuscular rays from the ash hidden setting sun – if you can look at the link .. the skies appear to show aeroplane vapour trails .. which we know cannot be true.

William Ashcroft painting “On the Banks of the River Thames” in London, November 26, 1883 - c/o feww.wordpress.com - volcano watch

Following the Tamboran eruption in 1815, Byron wrote the gloomiest of poems “Darkness” (“Morn came and went, And came, And brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread, Of this their desolation ...”) describing ‘this year (1816) without a summer’; Mary Shelley, it is said, became so fed up with the rain while visiting Byron in Geneva that she followed suit and wrote her exceptionally gloomy novel Frankenstein, published 1st January 1818.

Turner’s: Chichester Canal’s vivid colours may have been influenced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.

J M W Turner however saw the better side of the eruption as can be seen in his wonderful colourful atmospheric paintings of that time, Munch painting a decade later remembering the vivid lurid colours wrote about his painting “The Scream” and how it came to be:

I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.

Munch remembering the vivid lurid colours he painted in his "The Scream"

Those fire rainbow colours that were etched in the skies around the world allowed another great discovery to be made .. the equatorial smoke screen. Because the sunsets were seen to girdle the earth, an atmospheric scientist in Hawaii mapped these high altitude winds – that no-one until the 1880s knew existed: these air currents, this ‘equatorial smoke screen’, ultimately became known as the jet stream, which is somewhat ironic as today it takes Icelandic dust over Britain and Europe and ultimately around the world.

Reflected glory of reflected light gave us hues unknown to this latitude .. to delight our senses giving us an inkling of the lustrous surfaces of a distant peeping jade plant, dark blue, a rosea bellflower, dragon wing red .. colours those artistic pioneers and explorers could describe in paint or words.

Cobaea Scandens – 1836 – by Pancrace Bessa (ultra violet blue)

I hope the new volcano will slowly subside into sleep and we can return to our normal lives with our earthly hues, without the ash altering our existence below .. so we won’t see those extraordinary sights giving rise to true artistic licence for a volcanic palette, but I’m happy to know of the fiery hues without having to see them through rose coloured ash clouds.

Dear Mr Postman – at last summer seems to have arrived for a few days at least, we have the cold wind from the sea – which keeps us in check .. but the sun is glorious, and the sky is blue – my mother sleeps ... and all is quiet and peaceful. Happy days!

Hilary Melton-Butcher
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