Sunset, Wednesday, 27 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I don’t quite feel that I can, so I’ll let Prince:

Put the right letters together
And make a better day.

Sunset, Tuesday, 26 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I’d heard of word clouds. This afternoon (when it wasn’t yet overcast) I started looking for cloud words.

slate – asphalt – pavement – stone

wraith – fragment – shred – ice – cold

temple-like – pagoda-roofed – Le Corbusier

screen – sheer – scrim – glare – glaze – mica – isinglass

flat – pancaked – held between palms – heaven on one hand – on the other hand, earth

gray-blue – blue-gray – blue – gray

geographic – territorial – map-like – coastline – blue lagoon – bay – continental drift

And not least:

stratocumulus

Sunset, Monday, 25 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Out today after last night’s deluge and the resulting floods, it was easy to see in the untracked mud that no one else had been in the “back thousand acres” of this place where we rent – in fact no one’s been back there since deer hunting ended three weeks ago.

(The Rivanna at flood, by the way, was amazing to see, close-up in the woods.)

The first thing I thought (smug) was, wow, I guess these guys never come back here if they can’t shoot at deer. But then I realized, wait a minute, what if we hadn’t gotten Flint (the foxhound), who needs to run? How often would we come back here – how often did we come here, before we found him (late 2001) at the Fluvanna County SPCA, convinced by the shelter’s benign speculation that he was a mellow half-Lab?

Answer: Almost never.

It’s not just hunters. A lot of us need another reason, or we just don’t seem to get out much anymore.

Sunset, Sunday, 24 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Rain showers and very dark at sunset.

Earlier, from inside the woods: The sky cleared, just a while, in the south and east away from the sun. There’s a blue peculiar to this kind of moment – radiant but distant and not quite real, as if waiting in some other realm to be introduced into the world – as if ‘blue’ has just been invented. Obviously I don’t really know what adjectives describe it. Blurred roses of white cloud floated up in it, remnants of rain.

In the woods, the only leaves remaining against the sky were beech, leaves that hang on til March, pale brown to nearly white, curled dry. I didn’t want to dig out pen and paper (my usual portable note pad – a check carbon folded up in my back jeans pocket). So I kept walking and wrote in new blue ink on old beech paper.

Update on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 04:36PM by BVD

This image is available as a fine art print, here.

Sunset, Saturday, 23 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Firmament on parchment.

Sunset, Friday, 22 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I don’t know what’s with all the subaquatic imagery lately: I was out in a big field this afternoon after the sleet and rain had ended, and the sun started to burn into the clouds in the upper southwest corner of the sky, creating a ring of thinning white in the deep cold gray. Soon I could see the sun glaring in the center of the ring. I had the sudden thought that God was going ice fishing, and all of us down here were the fish.