Do you see the clouds as I do?

You are there and I am here and wondering: do we see the clouds in the same way?  The shapes and the forms they take,  their fleeting nature?  My friend gave me a book on clouds:  'The Cloudspotter's Guide', knowing that I have great views from my windows.   It's blue cover has gone bluer, the print's reaction to the sun's rays, placed as it is in it's obvious space next to a window.  A local bookseller must have gone to ground - all the books in his window have turned blue, even the yellow plastic designed to protect them has taken on a blueish hue.   It's quite a spectacle. 

Cirrocumulus lacunosus undulatus is something that particularly draws me visually.   Although to be fair most do apart from those damn dark flat grey ones that allow no sunlight through.

While taking photo's of clouds I'm reminded of my friend who dislikes the retinal photograph/image and conversely Alfred Stieglitz and Minor White: their interest in metaphysics and their attempts at making the photograph as metaphor or symbol.  Lynn Silverman too who photographed them and made them large (as if they aren't already).  Unlike Turner's paintings which were shockingly small, I'd always imagined them to be large having until that time only seen representations in books.  I am interested in how images of clouds become more like abstract paintings.   How, once their context is removed, they might imply something else.   The last but one painting I made might have been of clouds except it was vividly, lividly gyrating deep red, the last was blue and rising, it was about the sea where I'd finally landed.    Does the sea reflect the sky or is it more of a collaboration - so each reflects the other in a cosmic distant flirtation?

And then, in amongst all that dreamy retinal gorgeousness, my eyes are brought down to earth by the crazy eejit across the road who doesn't want his dog to look where the dog wants to look. 

Spot the difference...