I know this may be a stretch, but I have a special request. I am looking for an issue of your magazine from September 2, 1944. It is special to me because I am the boy scout in the painting by Stephen Dohanos. His son was a pal of mind and, in the 6th grade, I was asked to post in my scout uniform. I think I got paid $10! Plus I spent the night at his house and had a great time. I can still remember the shoot. Any change I could obtain a copy for my daughter. Thanks for your time and attention.

Sincerely,
George

George:

How nice to hear from you! We love to hear from former models for our wonderful cover artists and Dohanos was one of the best. September 2, 1944 is a cover showing three dogs looking wistfully at a departing school bus. You can see kids in the back windows of the bus, and I take it you’re the scout waving good-bye to the faithful friends.

You can obtain copies of most of the great artwork from our covers at www.curtispublishing.com.

Sincerely,
Saturday Evening Post Archives

Were you, or someone you know, a Post cover model? Please share your story with our editors at letters@satevepost.org.

Blast from the Past The Saturday Evening Post

Walk down a busy street. If most of the people passing by you had their heads tilted back staring up at the clouds, what would you think — that you were dreaming or that Martians were landing? The scenario seems unlikely in our pent-up present-day world, yet more people are taking the time to gaze upwards at nature’s magnificent displays in the sky.

A growing movement — nurtured by the Internet — now focuses attention on the upper skies and their curious, ever-changing daytime formations.

“I call it cloud consciousness,” says Jack Borden, a former Boston TV reporter who has made cloud watching and its promotion his primary passion for several decades. His For Spacious Skies organization helps promote “sky awareness” to young people through school projects.

Thirty years ago, Borden walked down an Arlington, Massachusetts, street, microphone in hand, stopping people, putting his hand over their eyes visor-style, and asking them to describe the sky. Not one mentioned the big puffy clouds drifting across the deep-blue background. “They didn’t even know if there were any clouds,” he says.

Borden’s reporting brought an outpouring of calls and letters from viewers whose sky awareness had been aroused. Area teachers became excited about sky watching and began building lessons around sky field trips to view what Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted to be the ultimate art gallery just above. The new experience seemed to stimulate learning. “The teachers were amazed at how it improved scholarship,” says Borden, who left reporting and started his nonprofit organization. His group was behind the series of cloud stamps issued a few years ago by the U.S. Postal Service.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, an English author and cloud advocate, has connected thousands of closet cloud watchers on his Cloud Appreciation Society Internet site.

The site is filled with more than four thousand gorgeous cloud photos of every classification and type snapped from every corner of the globe — even some from outer space, via cloud-spotting NASA astronauts.

“Maybe you can’t travel to all these places, but you can see the clouds over their skies,” says Pretor-Pinney. He’s thought about, but is not sure how to make, international cloud watching done in real time, though he thinks some day it may happen.

All the wonder above us begs the question of why most people relate to the sky and clouds simply as a kind of visual Muzak, unable to focus on some of nature’s most sublime free entertainment.

“Paying attention is a habit,” Borden explains, “and people are just not in the habit of seeing clouds as something relevant to their lives. Others tell them the weather, and most folks don’t seem to care any further.”

But for people who do take it further, there’s a wonder and pleasure that come only from looking upwards and really seeing the water droplets and air interplay in unending formations and movements in the atmosphere.

“Having a link with something that moves in such an eternal and graceful way slows you down,” says Pretor-Pinney. “And so I say spending time with your head in the clouds makes you a bit more grounded.”

Colorful Clouds

• The various colors of clouds can tell you what may be going on inside them. Clouds arise when water vapor in the air cools and condenses into micro-droplets. When the particles of water are densely packed, they reflect sunlight, giving a cloud its characteristic white color.
• As a cloud grows, its water droplets combine to produce larger droplets, causing the space between the droplets to enlarge as well and allowing light to penetrate. The more light that penetrates and is not reflected back, the grayer the cloud becomes. Thus grayer clouds may indicate rain.
• Bluish-gray clouds occur because blue and green light, at the short end of the visible spectrum, are more easily scattered by water droplets, while long wavelengths (red and yellow) are absorbed. The bluish color indicates rain-sized droplets in the cloud.
• A greenish hue appears when sunlight is scattered by ice. When a cumulonimbus cloud turns green, heavy rain, hail, strong winds, and tornadoes may be imminent.
• Yellowish clouds are rare and occur primarily during forest fire season. The yellow indicates the presence of smoke.
• Pink, orange, and red clouds are seen only at sunrise or sunset, the result of clouds reflecting the unscattered long rays of sunlight during those hours.

Sky Watch and Be Mindful

Do you know what the clouds looked like today? Here in Los Angeles County at dusk, long sheets of cirrus clouds streaked down the center of a mulberry-lit sky. Gorgeous. As I walked this evening—as I do every evening—I watched and did not see one person look or glance up at the sky. We live in a stunning world. What a shame to flash by it on a regular basis. Three things on this planet anchor us to the fact that we’re basically wind-swept flecks in an unhurried cosmos: the ocean, the mountains, and the celestial patterns in the sky. This most certainly includes clouds.

And while not everyone is lucky enough to have a view of the mountains or the sea, everyone gets an equal opportunity to look at the sky, 24/7, for free. Bill Gates and the poorest man standing near him see the exact same cloud formations above their heads.

Now if you were one of those kids who loved to lie on your back and stare for hours at the clouds making strange shapes, try to revive some of that youngster in you. Unfortunately, for most people over the age of ten, sky-watching probably falls in the “Don’t you have something better to do!” category. Try and ignore this.

The most powerful way I know to shift your “cloud awareness” is to take mindful note of the sky every day by jotting down the sky’s cloud formations for a month or more in your journal. If you don’t have a journal, start a cloud journal—or scribble the formations down on stray sheets of paper and keep them in a pile.

Myself, I’ve kept sporadic track of clouds for decades, and what I’ll ever do with the knowledge that on Sep-tember 15, 1982, the sky over Los Angeles was filled with extraordinary pink cumulus clouds at sunset, I’m not sure. But I do believe, in some way, that my taking notice has elevated my life.

—Janet Kinosian

Cloud Watching on the Web

Visit the following excellent websites to connect with other cloud lovers.

www.inclouds.com
Website devoted to cloud photography. Colorado photographer Gregory Thompson, an atmospheric scientist and meteorologist, displays breathtaking photos, including many rarer clouds, such as rotor, mammatus and Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds. Also offers excellent tips on cloud and sky photography.

www.environmentalgraffiti.com
Imaginative fans of clouds-that-look-like-things will want to check out the Environmental Graffiti website. Featuring what it calls the “30 Creepiest Clouds on Earth,” including cloudy famous faces [Bette Davis] and figures [cross-legged demons], cloud animals [Energizer Bunny] and various bizarre shapes [smoke angels and ET’s pointing finger]. Great fun—and what the kid in all of us adores about cloud humor.

The Cloud Watchers The Saturday Evening Post

Joe, Bob, and Jim Hautman of Minnesota have put their own stamp on the hallowed history of the contest by collectively sweeping first place eight times in the last 18 years—a record for a single family. The brothers also regularly take top honors in state duck stamp contests, and their art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and the White House. So successful have the brothers been at wowing contest judges that competitors find themselves looking over their shoulders whenever a Hautman entry is around. And that is almost always the case, because at least one or two Hautman brothers enter every Federal Duck Stamp contest.

The Hautmans’ prowess at winning is a hot topic in art chat rooms, where duck stamp competitors try to analyze the “secret ingredient” of their exceptional paintings. Called “The Hautman look,” one artist has described it as characterized by “strong contrasts, heavy darks, crisp detail, but not too much of it, and great-looking compositions when reduced.” Whatever it is, few deny that the brothers have justly earned their many wins. As one artist explained it, “the Hautmans are outrageously talented.”

Not surprisingly, the winning image on the 2008-2009, 75th-anniversary duck stamp (on left) is once again a Hautman original, this time a pair of pintail ducks relaxing among reeds and outlined against a gunmetal sky, painted by Joe Hautman, 52.

Joe, the oldest of the painting brothers, has a second profession he can fall back on should he ever tire of painting ducks. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. As a young man, he recalls being torn between his two favorite subjects, science and art. He chose science and decided to paint for fun. “I was painting on the side, and my brothers kept telling me I should enter the Federal Duck Stamp contest,” he says. “They had seen my work and thought I had a chance to do well.” And he did. On only his fifth attempt, he won the federal contest in 1992. Thinking that might be a fluke, he entered a state contest and won it, as well. That’s when he decided to trade his physics notebooks for a full-time palette and easel. “And I really haven’t regretted it at all,” he says.

The three brothers now live within thirty minutes of one another in the waterfowl-rich state where they grew up surrounded by hunters, wildlife, and artists. “Our mom was a professional commercial artist before she married,” Joe says, “and she used to invite her artist friends over to paint. Dad used to hunt, and he kept all his duck stamps. He wasn’t really a collector, but he just liked the images on them. He had a collection of all of them since the very first one in 1934. I think it is interesting because that’s part of the whole argument for having the pictorial duck stamp. It’s something that draws people into it. It’s not like having a number on your hunting license; it’s something that makes people think about ducks and want to learn more about them.”

None of the three brothers have formal art training, Joe says. Ironically, their older brother, Pete, did study to be an artist but turned to writing instead. He won The National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2004.

The brothers work in their separate home studios. Any similarities in their finished paintings, Joe says, is only in the mind of the beholder. “To me, it’s pretty easy to tell them apart,” he says. “They are very much reflections of our different personalities, maybe more in the way they are done than in how they look in the end. Jim is deliberate and methodical. He mixes up all the colors he wants beforehand, and he knows just what he’s going to do and puts the paint on in a very methodical way. He has a technique, which is a nice thing. Bob, on the other hand, is a much more free spirit. Maybe it sounds bad to say it, but he’s kind of chaotic. He just starts putting paint on the canvas. He may start out with a painting of a loon, and it will end up being a bear or something. You just never know where it’s going to go!”

So what is their winning ingredient? Part of it may be that they critique each others’ paintings, even though they are often competing. “I think that’s a huge part of our success, actually, Joe says. “Bob was just by yesterday with his entries for this year’s duck stamp contest. I’m not doing one, but he and Jim have both got one going, and Bob stopped by to get a critique. When you are doing a painting that you work on for so long, it’s really hard to maintain your perspective. You may send it in to a contest, and it comes back after you’ve lost, a few months later, and you go, ‘Oh, my, what did I do?’ Having that fresh look, if you can get it somehow, is a huge advantage—and it’s great to have somebody who knows the ducks and knows the contest and, most important, isn’t afraid to tell you what he thinks.”

When not concentrating on duck stamp paintings, the brothers produce a variety of wildlife art, usually of North American animals, such as elk, bear, and wolves. Some are so realistic, they appear almost like photographs. A recent work of Joe’s, however, has taken a different tack, a montage of fifteen different animals from India. “My wife is from India, and so we go there often,” he says. “I thought I had finished it. But I recently decided that the main animal I started with, which was a spotted deer, kind of never seemed right. So, I’m going to take that out and put a tiger in. That really makes it more of a kind of fantasy piece,” he says. “It’s a departure for me, but a direction it seems that it had to go.”

The Hautmans’ paintings sell in the four- to five-figure range. But if you want an original Hautman duck stamp painting, you may be disappointed. All of them have been purchased by one collector who displays them in his Florida home.

The brothers are duck hunters as well as painters, and Joe finds a connection between the two. “Part of hunting [as in painting] is a lot of observation,” he says. He spent two weeks painting this year’s winning picture. “But I spent a good number of weeks’ preparation before that working on designs,” he says. “I had five or six designs for a while and finally narrowed it down to a couple. When I finally decided which one I wanted to do, I worked on the drawing of that and doing some different color variations before I actually started painting, so it was a month or more to finish the whole thing.”

What made it stand out as a winner? “I wish I knew,” Hautman says. “Sometimes it’s just that way, that you get something and you don’t know what it is.”

Will a Hautman succeed again in the heat for the 2009-2010 federal duck stamp cover? By the time you read this article, the results of the October 2008 contest in Bloomington, Minnesota, will be known.

The Call of the Wild The Saturday Evening Post