The 200-year-old Beaufort Scale renders the force of wind into written language, dividing that natural phenomenon into thirteen categories based upon its observable effects. Because wind is nothing but what we feel and see it do, the Beaufort Scale describes not the wind, but the world blown by wind, and in the process, observation becomes language.

Maggie Tobin’s series “Calm Again: The Beaufort Scale Revised” depicts the categories of the Beaufort Scale and her own addition—number 13, “Calm Again.”  Tobin has put down in paint what we must do in our imaginations when reading the Beaufort Scale: she transforms the words of the Scale back into the natural phenomena which they attempt to describe.

However, in revising the Beaufort Scale as she has, Tobin moves from imagination to prophecy.  The act of adding a calm after the storm and placing that at the end of the progression as number 13 indicates a leap of the imagination that is not in direct reference to memory: certainly we have all seen storms subside and the calm that exists after the storm, but Tobin posits that this calm is a new thing, not a return to the conditions already described by Beaufort Numbers.
This is because “calm again” is a step beyond the limits of the experienced or imagined storm, beyond the devastation of number 12.  Her description of number 13—“sky glows pink/orange; no wind, no sound, no breath”—is a vision of the world beyond that ultimate storm: a world wholly destroyed and yet, simultaneously, a world most ready to be reborn.

It is a world of and yet beyond imagination, a world of ultimate destruction and yet most primed for rebirth. And in these paintings of Tobin’s, prophecy is revealed to be only the expression of our intuition: the painter has found a way to capture what we see and know before there are words for what we see and know—

The wind is itself without trees, the trees themselves without the wind, yet neither is ever without the other. And the same can be said of birth and death, creation and destruction, observation and imagination, the world, the word, and the work of art.

-- John Verbos

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