Winged Clouds and Cobalt Skies: The 1930s Frank Reaugh Sketch Trip Diaries of Lucretia Donnell

Talent, long study, and much hard work produce great art, ordinarily the work of a single person. On the other hand, elements of greatness sometimes find each other, meld, and produce beauty greater than the sum of the parts. So it is with Winged Clouds and Cobalt Skies. Three artists, Frank Reaugh, Lucretia Donnell, and her mother Lucretia, united their talents to do what all great art does: enrich the culture and the lives of others. From 1889 until 1941 Frank Reaugh routinely sketch-tripped the vast and then wild land in the High Plains of Texas and occasionally beyond. In 1905 he began taking his students along for on-the-scene instruction, each being assigned a work detail to keep the party disciplined and moving smoothly, including the keeping of a trip log. On these sketch trips in the 1930s, the teenaged Lucretia Donnell, among other duties, kept the log with apparent thoroughness (at least enough to satisfy Frank Reaugh) but more importantly for us, with perceptivity and all the exuberance of youth, none of which she lost in the intervening years. Little did anyone know in the 1930s that she was writing a book for the ages.