Sunset, Monday, 4 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.At the very last minute, a weird cloud space opened up in a resolutely cold blue-gray sky – I guess meteorologists or pilots might call it a new cloud deck – with unexpected colors. The sky behind the streaks was not open as it might appear here but a sort of flat high yellowy silver.

When I was out with Flint today – my six- or seven-mile walk, his more than 10-mile ramble – I saw the blackberry blossoms were just barely beginning to come out. It was tempting to think the chilly wet weather of the last three days might be a case of Blackberry Winter, but it’s still a bit early for that here. Usually, in Virginia, it’s one to three days of 50s and even 40s while the blossoms are really out, which means, it’s a bit of a come-down for Spring. Last year we didn’t seem to have a Blackberry Winter at all. In other parts of the South, of course, the blossoms come out much sooner, and the change in weather can be very serious, as I found out today from a blog by someone in the Ozarks.

I want to note an addition to my “Friends I Do Know” list, and that’s Minás, which is the name of a wonderful artist as well as the name of his boutique and gallery in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. Hampden’s the home of the annual Honfest, which is coming up on June 13th and 14th (hon).

To those who checked my post for last night’s sunset before this morning: I’ve added a link so that you can see the Hassam painting I mentioned, the one whose “rose tone” stayed with me for so long.

Sunset, Sunday, 3 May 2009

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

Raining tonight, and the “cracked bells and washed-out horns” of a wet northeast wind (just across my right shoulder, in this view) made me wonder how I might handle the painting – or, to continue with the song, what the silver saxophones might say to do. 

The rose tone behind, or within, the rain is something I first picked up from Childe Hassam’s “Late Afternoon, Winter, New York, 1900” – a famous painting of a snowstorm that I saw in a book I was given in 1972 (I still have the book).

My response to a sky of apparently nothing but gray is much different now than it was the first time I encountered it in this series, on June 28th, 1995, a painting I’ve posted, not for its own merits, which are very few, but as a point of departure. After that painting I began to realize that the series really emerges most on nights of a “non-sunset” sky. 

That 1995 painting, by the way, came after days of rain, and one day after the great Rapidan flood, which you can read about in rather technical but awe-inspiring detail here and here.

Sunset, Saturday, 2 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.The sky borrows from the ground tonight, using asphaltum and, as a roughly 50% ingredient of one of the grays, transparent earth yellow.

It seemed like a mineral sort of day – much warmer earlier, when the sky was a superheated quartz-water mix, flat white, with storm shards piled on the horizon.

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In addition to paintings listed as “recently added,” two more have now been archived for 2008, including the sunset from one year ago tonight.

Sunset, Friday, 1 May 2009

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

Sunset, Thursday, 30 April 2009

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

The rain was about to end, a problem because no one had been able to figure out what made it rain in the first place. The weather was confusing. Could have been a massive collision between swine flu and the Supreme Court. First-time unemployment claims were known to contribute to the formation of clouds. God knows, we needed the rain – another theory.

If the sky was so dark, how could the woods be so bright? Perhaps it was like the buzzing in those cheap rheostats in an IKEA lamp – you try to turn the light down, not only does the indicator light come on, the whole thing starts humming like an interstate highway in the middle distance. Sky down, woods up.

Some feared the trees might be turning into paint – which later proved true.

On the twenty-fifth rainy day, contests were held in elementary schools asking how many different kinds of gray could be seen in the sky. The winner identified more than three hundred distinct variations, including blue, yellow, and red.

Sunset, Wednesday, 29 April 2009

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