Sunset, Thursday, 3 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Today I wrote out some of my thoughts on aesthetics. So naturally, tonight’s sunset (which I like) turns out to have almost nothing to do with the specifics I wrote about!

Oh well, treachery is the spice of life. I think Julius Caesar said that. Here’s part of what I wrote ... I keep cutting out the boring parts ... by which I mean the really, indisputably, time-tested boring parts ...

*      *      *      *

At some point (around 25 years ago) I started feeling compelled to paint ‘cracks’ in the sky. In “Trees Between Fields” (on the bio page), “fields” had an intentional double or triple meaning – fields of grass, fields of perception, fields of reality. 

It’s no revelation to say that in art everything is more than what it appears to be. For me, the sky seems especially suited to the role of expressing more than itself, because we already tend to see it that way in ordinary life. The sky’s like a screen where we project the events and feelings of each day and night. We’re also accustomed to looking at it as if we’re trying to see through a veil. To quote Sam Cooke, “I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.” If you tell someone, “Well, what’s up there beyond the sky is the exosphere,” you won’t be addressing the question. Beyond the sky, in so many cultures, is visual shorthand for beyond this life.

But when I started painting sunsets, and for each day, I did feel somewhat constrained from painting the way I would if I were just painting any sky. Painting each one, of course, encourages the sense of being almost a ‘painter of record’. A certain fidelity seems called for, so it didn’t make sense or seem right to turn a dull rainy night in October 1997 into a field of blazing gold and orange, if later I was going to say, “Here’s the sunset from the 17th of October, 1997” (or whatever).

There have been exceptions – every once in a while through the years I’ve experimented with different ways of departing from a sort of representational norm. And, since mid-July, I’ve approached these images more and more with my aesthetic, while still keeping a relationship to “the way it is” on a particular night.

The sunset sky can be both an opaque screen and a misty veil. The hybrid of these would be called, in the theater, a scrim. You can project light against it. You can see light behind it.

Sunset, Saturday, 29 August 2009 / Notes from Pittsburgh, Part 3

William Theodore Van Doren. Neville Island, Pittsburgh, Pa. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

One of the best parts of our trip to Pittsburgh was going through the Andy Warhol Museum, where we spent about four solid hours. One of the best designed, most intelligently curated museums I’ve ever seen. Whether you love Warhol, or feel just lukewarm about him, or think you hate his stuff or just don’t get it – doesn’t matter, I think. Naturally this can’t be true for everyone, but I think almost anyone would come out of the museum enjoying and appreciating the man and his work.

It was a blast.

One thing I think I finally understood was how Warhol’s aesthetic could be at one and the same time absolutely rigorous and in a sense promiscuous. The peculiar unity of those elements made him a great image-monger and image-maker; for him mongering and creating became one thing. As much as he could create original personal imagery, and he could, he used that great natural talent to recognize and respond to the imagery of society, and so created not simply images but icons.

And there you have an aesthetically naive, backward writer sounding as if he’s just discovered something really new. But for me it was, so there you go.

Along similar lines, I’d love to rave about the beauty of Pittsburgh, and especially the bridges, but here again I think it’s been done many times before. Nevertheless, I’ll say it: I can hardly believe how beautiful the bridges are. And to have one named for Roberto Clemente (The Great One), next to another named for Andy Warhol, next to another named for Rachel Carson – all three of splendid design – is really almost too good.

Images of the Sunset

This all started – well, in a way the change really started the moment I began painting sunsets and sunrises over 14 years ago. From the beginning, there’s always been tension between two tendencies.

On one side there’s what you might call just keeping the appointment with the sunset – just doing it – being there and painting. Entailed in this are the many implications, meditative and metaphysical, of ‘following the sun’.

On the other side, there’s the goal of painting a certain kind of image – an aesthetic goal. In other words, making a damn good painting.

To paint the sunset every day – and for two years both sunrise and sunset – especially while earning a living doing something else – means the painting you make is the painting you get. There’s no time for do-overs or revisions or long processes of development or elaboration of any one image. Everything is alla prima – done in one go. They are whatever they are.

Of course, it’s not only a matter of time – there’s also the kind of sky that happens on a given day.

From the beginning, I was – I think necessarily and even productively – divided. Do you want it fast or do you want it good? It had to be fast or the whole project would break down. It had to be good or there would be little joy in continuing. These two aspects were always in play – in a sort of balance.

Adding this blog – starting in April – intensified the tension.

First, the added steps involved in posting, plus writing, meant more pressure on the available time. Now I needed not only to paint but to cut the painting out of its watercolor block (for example), tape it to a wall for shooting, clean brushes, wash hands to avoid clogging the Nikon with cadmium yellow, adjust lights, shoot, offload, save file, upload, write, and preferably do all of this before everyone in this part of the world had gone to bed – and in time for some dinner! (We have dinner late, so in summer these things collide.)

But second, communicating with you – you know who you are! – also has meant I’m more aware of the qualities of each image.

Until now, I resolved this tension by understanding that the value of the series resided both in the fact that I went out every day and painted the sky and in the way I painted it. If they weren’t of a certain quality, doing them every day wouldn’t mean much. Yet doing them every day imbued them with a sort of message about the passage of the days – a relationship with time.

So, I resolved the tension by not resolving it, because it can’t be completely resolved. I accepted both sides. But the balance can shift. And now I think it has.

At this point, from stage left, enters my brother Steve (a metallurgist by profession, developing materials for aerospace). Then, from stage right, in honor of Bastille Day, a Frenchman, Marcel Proust. More precisely, I’ll bring in one of his translators, Lydia Davis. They helped me see where this was going.

So, at our lunch in Frederick the other day, Steve said something to me that was very similar to the sort of thing people will say from time to time. He really liked the painting of a particular sunset (June 15th) – and then he added something like, “Not that I don’t like them all, but that one seems special.”

I knew what he meant because I often feel the same way. Every so often this everyday process yields something that is more remarkable, in and of itself, as an image.

I think I was ready to hear his comment: I felt I wanted to do more of those kinds of images.

Now, I should preface the following by stipulating that no one who has just finished reading their very first volume of Proust (Swann’s Way, from In Search of Lost Time) should be allowed (1) to comment on it in public, and especially and above all (2) to draw any sort of connection between it and their own work. It isn’t done, and should never be done.

In my defense, I will say that I read it very ... very ... slowly ... over a period of at least six months, almost exclusively on Sunday mornings. And you thought I didn’t go to church.

(I know a couple of people who could read it in one Sunday, but Gillian, Sarah, sorry, hate you both.)

Anyway, I’m not actually going to get into Proust, just the introduction by Lydia Davis, which I read after I finished the book, and which, like Steve’s remark, probably struck me because I was ready for it:

The wistful closing passage [of Swann’s Way] ... introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance, of beloved places and people, and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory, and finally our art. For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus ... the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.

I thought about how I’d often said that the sunset paintings completely submit to time but also suggest something beyond time. I realized (for the first time!?) that one way the sunsets deal with time is by holding back a piece of it.

I had written the following a few days ago, before I read Lydia Davis. I ended up not posting it because it didn’t feel right at that time. But now maybe it does:

When the sun sets, there’s the feeling of understanding where we are, precisely because the sun is leaving us – leaving us exactly – here. There’s got to be a natural desire to follow, to be as timeless as the sun, to stay with it as it dictates time, that Lucky Old Sun.

What I realize, thanks to Stephen L. Van Doren and M. Proust (together again for the first time) (don’t worry, Steve won’t mind that a bit), is that just bravely going forth and painting the sunset every day and occasionally getting a really strong image isn’t enough for me.

To find the timelessness inside time, I need to go for whatever art can get.

I know not every image will work, but ... we’ll see what happens.