Sunset, Wednesday, 5 August 2009

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

I guess, having written about sumac, of all things, which probably only a handful of people in the world care about – none of whom read this blog – I’m forced to keep writing about it, just to get my story straight.

Turns out that I was wrong twice (and counting?). I was wrong from the age of 12, let’s say, until last week, while I assumed that the sumac around here was staghorn sumac. O.K., no disgrace, I think I got the idea from my Boy Scouts manual, which was probably written by Yankees. (Staghorn is what they have.) 

But I should have paid more attention to detail when I said that what we have, in profusion down in the Scrubby Field, is scarlet sumac. I think I liked the name. It isn’t. Apparently, it’s what they call shining sumac, or something close to it.

This I know because the leaves have ‘wings’ – as seen here:

The stem has a narrow band of green leaf running up along it, from leaflet to leaflet – those are wings. And the leaflets don’t have stalks. Botany is tough.

And it’s probably not over. I’ve previously described the fruit as clusters turning from the color of gold grapes to two shades of magenta. Well, maybe that’s only the female plants. The field is also filled with what looks like the same sumac, except the fruit clusters are flowering much more yellow – each flower with (I think) five bright gold stamens. We’ll see how both types of plants turn out.

Perhaps the only way I can ever make all of this up to you is to paint the field at some point.

On a different subject entirely, I made an interesting musical discovery tonight while cooking a sauce, for gnocchi, of zucchini, garlic and tomato. The first 67 or 89 times I played Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi,” from Love And Theft, I was just glued to it; it pretty much killed me. But then, maybe because my frame of mind was brightening a bit, the next 23 or 31 times I played it, it seemed kind of oppressive. Great, of course, but a little oppressive.

What I discovered while cooking is that if you sing along with Bob, and sing around him – almost doesn’t matter how – and sing the lines more loosely than he does, perhaps making them a little longer, it seems to transform the experience. Makes it like a new song. Of course, the people who know “Mississippi” may be the very same ones who care about sumac. 

Sunset, Thursday, 25 June 2009

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

I’m doing some homework on a local issue, but one that reverberates in many other places – here it’s the construction of the Meadowcreek Parkway in Charlottesville, and the fate of McIntire Park. Much of this is covered in an informative, energetic, lucid and confusing-as-hell website, savemcintire.com.

I wasn’t going to mention any of that today but I bumped into an old acquaintance and magazine interview subject this morning – he may not have remembered my name, we just smiled at each other – John D’earth – and then I saw John mentioned at the top of the McIntire site. Superstitious cat that I am, I took it as a sign. John is probably too young to appreciate my using this term, but if he isn’t the spiritual godfather of the Charlottesville music scene, then I don’t know who is. (More here.)

Development and transportation issues in Charlottesville are kind of funny. It’s a town filled with environmentalist liberals (if I lived there, I’d be one of them) but, for a small place, it has a really vicious urban heat island effect. I live only 10 miles out, but to drive down 29 into town in late spring, summer or fall is often to hit a wall of heat. Leaving, you cool down by very noticeable degrees.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s story about my walk and ”Pancho and Lefty” – which of course was a true accounting right up to the pistol shots – I wanted to share this little paragraph buried way down in the Wikipedia entry on Townes Van Zandt. As a preface, I might mention that Bob Dylan reportedly always had a very high regard for Van Zandt and the esteem was mutual.

Anyhow:

Van Zandt has been referred to as a cult musician and “a songwriter’s songwriter.” Musician Steve Earle, a close friend, once said Van Zandt was “the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” The quote was printed on a sticker featured on the packing of At My Window, much to Van Zandt’s displeasure. Van Zandt responded: “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken.”

Tonight I just want to be a fan and call this my Michael Jackson sunset.

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.