Sunset, Tuesday, 23 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

For Emily, with love.

Emily’s a former backhoe operator and homecoming queen, a longtime blackjack dealer at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, a wild horse woman (woman who rides wild horses, in addition to the other meaning), and an ace stained glass artist, as well as someone who cares for other people, both for a living and in her life. My sister. She shares her birthday with our mom, Helen Bezilla Van Doren (1923–1986).

Emily drove across the country, from Norfolk to L.A., on a motorcycle when she was 20. Actually, when she got to the Grand Canyon her boyfriend, Cruz Treviño, met her and they rode the rest of the way together. Cruz is responsible for inspiring me to start writing music; I think if he and Emily had stayed together my dad might have lived another five years just so he could keep arguing with Cruz.

The only counsel my dad offered Emily for her trip was to give her his buck knife in a leather sheath.

Emily thinks Mom was a little envious. Her advice: “Go west, young man!”

*    *    *    *

I’m very happy to note that as of today we have an index to earlier entries (there’s a link also on the right side of the page). 

Sunset, Monday, 22 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Sunset, Sunday, 21 June 2009

Locust Dale, Madison County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Our destination (see previous post) offered an amazing vista, with Old Rag about smack in the center. This of course is a much longer view than the one in the painting from early afternoon – these mountains are around three times higher than those on our eastern horizon.

A friend I’d worked with in L.A. and then lost touch with decided to build a house in Virginia; I rediscovered him living one mile down the road from me. When he first got here he made a common westerner’s mistake and called the Blue Ridge mere “hills” – no doubt because, on the horizon, they bear a superficial resemblance to the Santa Monica Mountains, or, as they’re known in one section, the Hollywood Hills. 

Once you get up there, in the Blue Ridge, you realize you’re in a seriously massive territory all its own.

Twelve years ago, Laura and I traveled to the wonderful city of Montréal for our honeymoon. We had no idea that June 21st was also the anniversary of the hanging of Marie-Joseph Angélique, a Portuguese-born African slave convicted – on shaky evidence – of deliberately starting a fire that burned much of the city in 1734.

If you go to the linked article, I can save you a little time by noting that the research controversies mentioned at the beginning don’t have much to do with the major facts of the case. Also, I don’t always mean to refer people to Wikipedia, but sometimes that’s a natural place to start. Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, is available only by subscription – I subscribe for the sake of my research for editorial clients – and, in any case, seems too conservative or hidebound to include many subjects like the unfortunate Angélique.

Come to think of it, I have a literally hidebound set of Britannica on my shelf, and she’s not in there, either.

Solstice and Sunset

To all who have been visiting over the past 24 hours from around the world to check out the 21 June sunset – presumably because of an interest in the solstice – well – to quote a popular song from 1950 –

If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked A Cake ...

Seriously, and truly, I think the solstice has so much personal significance for me, I forgot to note the universal significance. It may be a bit late for me to consider it now, but I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit today.

As to the personal significance, among other things, I should probably explain that my wife Laura and I had our first date on the winter solstice, became engaged on the following winter solstice, and were married at the summer solstice – and the 21st and the number 21 have resonated with us, sometimes in ways that are just about unbelievable. For my part, I’m such a solstice (and equinox) watcher, I take it all somewhat for granted – it’s in the foreground. For example, I deliberately began this sunset series – the practice of painting them every single day – at the autumn equinox, 22 September 1997.

(To digress further – which is what I do best – when I was producing The Wall Paper in Los Angeles, and had to set up a regular schedule of publication in order to qualify for certain periodicals mailing rates, I wanted to publish on each full moon. However, perhaps not surprisingly, I discovered that the United States Postal Service does not care about the phases of the moon.)

So, I was thinking of what I could say to everyone about the solstice other than, “Hey, we went out to celebrate our anniversary.”

I started thinking about being a kid in Virginia, and the way I remember sometimes feeling around midsummer. These feelings are hardly an unalloyed celebration of the solstice.

It’s a largely visual memory, or a complex of implicit, unspoken feelings and ideas embodied in one moment’s very simple and singular image. The image is looking straight up from the ground in our back yard – a half-dirt, half-grass jumble – to the very top of the blue sky. In a sense, that’s all it is: blue sky.

My view sights along a very straight, very tall (60 feet or more), triple-trunked yellow poplar that stood right behind the little house near the propane tank and the broken flagstone of an unfinished patio. Above, beyond the tree – and the radio is playing “Beyond The Sea” (Bobby Darin) or perhaps Domenico Modugno’s “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu” – the bluest, clearest, deepest, and, somehow, hottest sky of midsummer seems to go on forever, literally in time as well as space. It’s the height of summer, and never-ending.

To a kid, that endlessness is not necessarily a completely comfortable and happy feeling. It may seem, for example, a little too hot. (It was.) Or there are too many gnats. (There were.) There also may be parents in the yard and you may feel, as children sometimes will, that you’ve crash-landed on a planet that is not altogether capable of supporting life. At the same time, the world is so amazing, and it’s presenting itself to you in all its amazingness in one image, yet it can’t be contained in that image, so the image is overflowing.

(Painting may be a search for the balance of elements that will produce that kind of overflowing image.)

Anyway, the solstice. This kid – me – or the rhetorical ‘you’ – in that moment of seeing the full height of summer, the vastness of the world, you may fear that the things you sense that are unhappy will weigh down on you forever, will never go away, while the fantastic perfection you’ve just glimpsed, the essence of summer, may never come true, may exist only for this moment, and only far away, at the top of the sky. But you seal it in your mind, in your heart, and know you’ll never let it go.

What I find so interesting and beautiful about the symbolic power of the solstice, of midsummer, and of midsummer night, is that the solstice is literally only one instant, a moment, the summit, one little tiny point, and yet it stands for everything, expresses all that is timeless, finds endless summer at summer’s height. I somehow think the human conception of solstice is a great act of faith and of imagination, and I love it, to put it simply. I think I could live there.

In a somewhat similar vein, painting the sunset every day is a recognition of time, but to me, ultimately, the observance of each day seems to break through time.

If you came here for the solstice, I hope I haven’t missed you, and I hope you’ll look around. I can say truthfully, in the words of the song:

Oh I don’t know where you came from
’Cause I don’t know where you’ve been
But it really doesn’t matter
Grab a bowl and fill your platter
And dig dig dig right in ...

Early Afternoon, Summer Solstice 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Laura and I will be out tonight celebrating our twelfth anniversary, and the chances that tonight’s sunset will be painted or posted tonight are exactly zero. It’ll be up tomorrow. If you’re out to dinner tonight in Locust Dale, Virginia, at a place that styles itself as the Inn at Meander Plantation, I’m the guy stepping away from the table at about 8:30 and going outside with a pencil and pad in my hand.

Since I’m not going to be broadcasting on this frequency tonight, I thought I’d try to leave a little something from the day – this was painted between 1:30 and 2:00, almost exactly 12 hours after the solstice. The view is in almost the opposite direction of the sunset, southeast, toward the Southwest Mountains.

It’s a near-perfect summer day, much like 12 years ago, except that day was hotter, over 90, and there was no A/C – no electricity – in the little St. James Chapel (Garth Chapel) on Garth Road. Our first dance, at the reception at White Hall Vineyards, was to a recording we had made of ourselves singing “Memories Are Made Of This” – and, as you can see, so they are.

Sunset, Saturday, 20 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.Summer, scheduled for tomorrow, showed up today, although not until after noon.

After a back-and-forth springtime miasma of either too much heat or not enough, and rain in either case, and a close tropical morning about as oppressive as it gets, the superb high blue broke through. An hour or two of heating up all the leftover moisture until it sizzled, and then summer set up its administration.

I was driving home just before sunset, and the green roadside finally had summer depth – countless greens, watermelon green, limousine in shade, tin can green, popsicle and firecracker twilight, Fragonard or Boucher woman on a swing pink and green, baseball diamond emerald under the lights.