An Inness Sky

There is nothing like an Inness sky. George Inness can consistently capture the look and feel of a sky (any sky) at its most expressive: he manages to preserve the kind of sky that makes you summon the family to drop everything and come and look out the window. He didn't only paint the skies that come before and after storms, but those are the paintings of his that excite me the most.

A few years ago I wrote a piece for three cellos as a musical attempt to "paint" an Inness sky. Unfortunately the synthesized recording is only a suggestion of what real instruments can do. The picture above comes from a postcard purchased at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where the painting makes its home in the permanent collection. The real thing, in its oiled "flesh," does far more for me than the postcard or its digitized image, but the image does help remind me of what it was to experience the real painting.