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Sarasota News Leader January 25, 2013 Page 79 mulus, stratus — so familiar to us — captured the ter, Florida is 10 percent clouds, 90 percent land. imagination of the public and inspired poets such The reverse is true in summer. as Wordsworth ("I wandered lonely as a cloud.") From her balcony atop a Sarasota high-rise Jocelyn delights in "big cloud" days. Steve, a songwriter, Shelley and Goethe wrote poems in his honor. loves the shape shifters in clouds. "They're always Howard, himself a painter, inspired British artist in a state of becoming!" he says. Schaften — little John Constable, who made cloud-filled skies the sheep — remind Kirsten of her German childhood. focal point of his paintings. Constable was emulatLeonardo da Vinci came up with many of his invening earlier Dutch painters such as Hobbema. With tions while observing the skies. Lying on his back in one foot in the sea, the fragile Dutch landscape in continual wonder at the changing panorama above Hobbema's art is reduced to a low horizon dominat- him, he got more inspiration from clouds than any ed by majestic skies of fleeting shapes. intellectual exercise. Just as clothes make the man, clouds make the land and forge a connection between land and sky. A puffy cabbage palm is mirrored in the cumulous cloud above it. Our view of the landscape is determined by the presence or absence of clouds. In win- In no other place is the "P" word mentioned as often as it is in Florida. Perhaps it is because rows upon rows of little puffy clouds against a cerulean sky invoke visions of Paradise. One half expects angels playing harps to peek out. %