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William Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.
Storms skirting us on all sides, with sudden brief falls of rain, and at times the sky was ragged, with clouds in Tiepolo-tall perspective reaching way up and angels and whatnot sitting atop cumulonimbus. Just before sunset, everything closed up again and turned an ominous pallor of brown-yellow-gray, and then a sort of violet-yellow-gray, and I wasn’t sure what I would paint. Started painting.
Cloudworld
The illusion was that clouds stretched left to right, south to north, in front of us, when in fact they wrapped completely around us, front to back, over, and under, so that we lived in a silk ball of spun cloud, and our cloud ball hung from a tree, a tree very like a galaxy.