Gavin pretor pinney biography of michael
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Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Robin Mills went to Somerton, Somerset, to meet Gavin Pretor-Pinney. This fryst vatten his story.
“I was born and brought up in London, but my father is from here in Somerset, and my mother’s from the States, from New York. In the 1970s, they built the house they now live in, so from around that time we would come down here regularly for weekends and holidays. So I’ve always had a connection to this area, and the Pinney family are from West Dorset. inom have an older brother, Giles, and a sister, Jenny, who also live locally.
I studied all sciences at Westminster School. inom was a bit of a science nerd. inom got into Oxford to read philosophy and physics, but ended up changing to philosophy and psychology. It was the philosophy that inom enjoyed, but you can’t do that on its own at Oxford, nor was it particularly vocational, so afterwards I went to huvud St Martins in London to do an MA in graphic design. inom went from studying the sciences to the arts, which felt particularly enr
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Do you know your volutus from your fluctus? Meet Gavin, the UK's top cloud boffin who says happiness lies in the sky
In 2005, Gavin Pretor-Pinney travelled from England to Australia just to see a cloud. The cloud in question was a volutus, but locals in North Queensland call it ‘morning glory’. You can see volutus clouds most places, but the versions you get in Australia are more frequent and more dramatic than anywhere else.
Morning glory clouds are shaped like long tubes. They sit low in the sky – less than two kilometres above ground – and can stretch for 1,000 kilometres. In the outback, glider pilots surf along them like they’re waves.
Pretor-Pinney had to wait several days in a tiny remote town before a volutus finally appeared. Then he got into a Cessna plane – with the door taken off – and was flown alongside the cloud: ‘It was kind of wild.’
Now 56 and living in Somerset with his wife and two children, Pretor-Pinney runs the Cloud Appreciation Society, a club dedicat
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Gavin Pretor-Pinney wants you to look up
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Clouds are one of the first things we learn to draw, but how often do we really think about them? Realistically speaking, not unless we want to check on the weather. Gavin Pretor-Pinney wants to change that. The cloud enthusiast will speak at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia on Thursday, October 17, at 5:30 p.m. His lecture “Cloudspotting for Beginners” will inspire people to see the sky anew. Pretor-Pinney, born in 1968 in London, didn’t always have his head in the clouds. Before founding the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2005, he co-founded The Idler, a magazine that argues for the importance of downtime in creative thinking. One day, he decided to take his own advice and left for a seven-month sabbatical in Rome, which ended up changing his life forever. There was hardly ever a cloud in sight, which was unusual for someone from London. This experience made him realize that he had a de