Truth of Skies

Haskins’s Skywall and Skycube series were been born from a contemplative practice of regularly taking time to look up and beholding the wonder and beauty of the sky each day. This new series of original photographs were taken over the past 2 years as he prepared for and developed his ongoing exhibition Landscape + Light, which was part of his residency at Edith Farnsworth House in rural Illinois an hour outside of Chicago. The title of the series was taken from the 1843 essay Of Truth of Skies, by John Ruskin, excerpted below:

"It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

... there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory…And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly.

The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them: but the sky is for all,

...it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinet, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential.

And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought…

Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south and smote upon their summits until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted as unseen.”