Sky blue I - V

In Clouded Over curator Janice Baker created a 400 year international journey reviewing the depiction of clouds. Other artists included John Constable, Rosalie Gascoigne, Hans Heysen, Magritte, JMW Turner and Aert van der Neer. The five prints that make up this work question the ways we perceive the sky and cultural interpretations of colour. The work utilises traditional and contemporary print technologies to refer to direct experiences of the weather.
Acknowledging the tradition of nineteenth century landscape art, Duxbury investigated English culture, weather diaries, writings and artworks of the time and discovered that there were very few references to blue sky, although in the same period the 'cyanometer' which could determine the shade of blue of the sky was devised in France. The art critic John Ruskin used text to describe the sky, very poetically, in his 'word-paintings'. In Sky Blue I-V (2002) Duxbury created large-scale photographic works of stormy skies, predominantly black and white, overlaid with words for the colour blue - indigo, azure, sapharine, ultramarine and caerulean. The space behind the clouds that Duxbury's words evince are described by Ruskin as the result of an effect peculiar to rain clouds, 'its openings exhibit the purest blue which the sky ever shows. 'The incongruity between overcast skies and Duxbury's text gives expression to the inadequacy of language to prescribe order on nature.' (Janice Baker, curator, exhibition notes).
Sky Blue I-V invite the viewer to picture colour in the mind's eye. Each large-scale image of a particularly grey cloudy sky is discreetly overprinted in silver with a word for blue. The word triggers additional associations with language to recall the experiential influence of the weather and our recording of it.