Truth of Skies

Haskins's Skywall and Skycube series were born from a practice of looking up and beholding the wonder and beauty of the sky each day. To celebrate his newest Skycube, Image Continuous, Haskins curated a series of original photographs entitled Truth Of Skies, which were taken from his contemplations of the sky over the last few years as he prepared and developed his exhibition Landscape + Light for his residency at the Edith Farnsworth House. 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;
bright as it is, it is not “too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food;” it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the 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…
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 moldered 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.”

If you might be interested in a small signed print of one of these images or would be interested in receiving the entire series, please email us: info@dwhstudio.com.

Landscape + Light has been extended through May at the Edith Farnsworth House

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