#276.  WHERE YOU ARE.  Andrew Ziminski’s Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles is a nice, knowing and readable book for anyone who cares for the topic.  It would fit very nicely in a pile with Robert McFarlane’s Landmarks, his book on the vanishing dialect vocabulary of the British earthscape, Patrick de Rynck’s How to Read A Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters, for the many young people who grow up without knowing the classical and Biblical referents in European art, and George Herbert’s poems, the most intimate and everyday poetry of the Anglican spirit.  Ziminski’s book is the work of someone who has for years had his eyes and his hands on the buildings and the decorations he describes.  There’s something close-up, something familiar, something affectionate without being teary or slobby about it, in what he writes, and he writes for the common reader; he assumes your interest, but he would never scold you for what you might not know.  And in with whatever might be familiar to anyone who did grow up with church architecture around them, there are also plenty of stray bits of news.  You get hogbacks and scratch dials, vicar’s peels and angel roofs, you get reminded of the Green Man without plucking out the heart of his mystery (as if anyone ever could) and (from Ireland) the sheela-na-gig, perhaps the weirdest of all the weird creatures that crawl up and down church walls.  You’re told why a bonfire is called a bonfire (p. 365), and that an x-ray machine revealed in 2016 that someone had broken into Shakespeare’s grave and stolen his head (rude).  As you can probably tell, I’m highly susceptible to all this kind of thing, and enjoyed the book greatly.  Like the other books cited, it’s part of a good effort to let people know where they are and with what surrounded—well illustrated with photos and drawings, and written with an admirable timbre of enthusiasm.

     “I have done a good deal of skying,” was the phrase he would use.  Part of what artists do in any medium is to help us see, as I said, where we are and with what surrounded, and it was part of John Constable’s focus as a painter to look up as well as around.  His maturity coincided with the founding of the Meteorological Society of London and the publication of the first book on the classification of cloud forms; he wrote a close analysis of a Dutch landscape to show “that Ruisdael understood what he was painting,” reflecting the new enthusiasm for the observational sciences.  Constable’s contemporary, Thomas Girtin, would “expose himself to all weathers” to forward the accuracy of his painting, as Turner once lashed himself to the mast of a ship to be able to observe a storm at sea.  This was a new attention to the world, a new sympathy of science and the arts—“Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?”—and few painters ever respected it more, or more skillfully, than Constable.  The skies became part of the harmony and dynamism of his landscapes; “Always remember, sir,” he wrote in a letter, “that light and shadow never stand still,” and he followed his own advice admirably.  I first discovered his sky studies—oil and watercolor sketches entirely of clouds, often annotated with dates and notes on weather conditions--decades ago, visiting the Yale Center for British Art; and now we have Constable’s Skies, an admirable small album with texts by Mark Evans, to keep the game going.  It is an axiomatic tradition of New England life that the weather is always doing something, and here is our chance to see what the very similar skies of England were getting up to.  It’s a pure pleasure of a book: Constable did all the study and labor, and we get to have all the fun.  Hardly seems fair, but I’ll take it.

--Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of England.  Profile Books, 2024.

--Landmarks, by Robert McFarlane.  Penguin, 2016.

--How to Read a Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters, by Patrick de Rynk.  Abrams, 2004.

--The Complete English Works, by George Herbert.  Everyman’s Library, 1995.

--Constable’s Skies: Paintings and Sketches by John Constable, text by Mark Evans.    Thames & Hudson/V&A, 2018.