Sunset, Monday, 31 August 2009

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

More wild black cherries today on the trail with Flint. I don’t know about chipmunks feasting on the pits, but if these wonderful purple-black–skinned babies aren’t comparable to tomatoes and grapes and chock full of antiaccidents, or nontoxicants, and likeopium, then, as someone used to say, I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher.

Sunset, Sunday, 30 August 2009

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

I forgot to mention that my Aunt Millie in Pittsburgh, on the morning of her 90th birthday, made cheddar biscuits, from scratch, for us to give to our dog, Flint. We can now report that Flint, the most discerning gourmand hound (‘It’s not a treat until I say it’s a treat’), has awarded Millie’s biscuits his highest rating.

Millie also gave us some tomatoes she’s grown this summer in her backyard garden, and she wanted us to take home a few Chambersburg [Pennsylvania] peaches.

She said, “Oh, every year we just can’t wait for those Chambersburg peaches, let me tell you, and they’re finally here!”

To be 90 and looking forward to this year’s Chambersburg peaches – I think that’s good.

Sunset, Wednesday, 19 August 2009

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

In the vast museum gallery of the woods, walking with Flint, the sun through cloud cover skylight, I see art in reverse – Courbets and Corots, Constables, Sisleys, Homers and Sargents before they became these things. They started here, somehow. Even the most visionary Cézannes, the O’Keeffes, Dalis, Kandinskys, Rothkos, Warhols, Hockneys: What a room ...

Flint stops to drink from a stream, in the museum cafeteria.

Sunset, Wednesday, 12 August 2009

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

My brother Michael Addison Van Doren, of Austin, Texas, the most astronomically inclined of all our fanatically meteorologically inclined clan, advises us to check out the Perseids in that “universal palette,” the sky, and make our own “attestation to the heavens.” (Yes, he’s even worse than I am, I believe.) He quotes his fellow University of Virginia–based dreamer and wanderer, Poe, from “Evening Star”:

’Twas noontime of summer,
And mid-time of night ...

My excuse for forgetting the Perseids has been clouds, clouds, clouds. In the woods today with Flint there was full cloud cover and a little rain, so I was surprised for an instant by sunlight over the ground – didn’t make sense. There was the thick brown-gray dead-leaf layer, then green running cedar all over the place. Everywhere in the cedar, little dogwood seedlings had popped up, two or three leaves each, and less than a foot high. Those that probably won’t make it had turned yellow – little groups of dying dogwoods. Pale yellow dogwood sunlight.

Sunset, Wednesday, 24 June 2009

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

Out with Flint, it was a normal day. 

Oak leaves, green and glossy, stuck out everywhere into the trail, above last year’s layers of brown fallen leaves, some still whole, some broken down into recognizable pieces, then the litter, then blackish-brown dust, then oak dust turned to clouds. Many’s the highly decorated sunset I’ve seen with oak leaf cloud cluster. 

As usual, the ground and air refused to be entirely separated from each other.

As we crossed the section we call Middle Earth (so named because for years our trails encircled the large area of woods but Laura and I never actually went through), it was evident that trees supported the sky, or to put it another way, without the trees the sky would fall. 

In clumps of large ferns I saw fossils of the present forming by the instant. Soft deep cushions of moss grew faster than my understanding of moss.

I took the trees’ lower limbs, some with sharp broken ends and ready to fall, as a palpable warning not to make living woods into poetry or anything undead.

*    *    *    *

When we came out into the open the “Mexican guys” the landlord uses to cut the fields had just finished the last section and were taking a break at the edge of the woods. Flint ran up to them like he usually does with anyone in these situations and starting circling the tractors and barking like a maniac. I assured the guys he would follow me after a minute or two; they were both at one of the tractors, one sitting in the seat, the other standing as if on a sort of running board on the other side near the front.

“That’s O.K.! It’s O.K.!” they said.

I kept walking and, thankfully, Flint did stop and followed me in short order. I waved and without looking back yelled out “Buenas tardes!” in my best casual, I’m-really-not-trying-too-hard effort at Spanish.

That’s when they shot me four times in the back with their pistolas.

In my anxiety to avoid stereotypes I had failed to notice the fully stocked bandoleers across the guys’ chests. Not to mention the sombreros, big mustaches, and menacing smiles with gold teeth.

My dying thought, if only I can get Townes Van Zandt to commemorate this ... could he be bothered to split the difference between Pancho and Lefty?

Sunset, Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.A furious heavy rain for most of an hour, then this break showed up in the west, while it was still raining here, and lasted ... just long enough to complicate my life! Within ten minutes it was raining hard again, and the horizon was once again completely gray.

The way sudden changes in the weather ‘complicate’ things got me thinking about how this series is very much a species of performance art – except I’ve done performance art before, and it was nothing like this. Usually one gets to pick and choose the work and plan a show carefully.

To give one example, to fill just three or four minutes of a show, I painted very close copies of the trees in “Trees Between Fields” (a painting you can find on the side of the page here) – except instead of being ten inches tall, painted in oil on canvas, these trees were eight feet tall, spray-painted on styrofoam, and carved out to make ‘sculptures’ that I could move around on the stage. (Nasty stuff, styrofoam, to work with on that scale.) The painting itself took perhaps a year – I used to work very gradually, and in one day might add just a few small glazes – and wasn’t done until I felt I had got it just where I wanted it. The cutouts took an intense couple of weeks.

With the sunsets, whatever I can do within the hour – involving maybe 20 to 30 minutes of actual painting – is what we get, and I never know if I’ll have any idea how to approach that night’s sky. I think it’s pretty surprising, after thousands of these, that before two nights ago (the 8th) I don’t think I’d ever painted a sunset with the rain trailing from the clouds.

But then ‘Howard’ says – you may remember Howard from the D-Day anniversary – “When you’ve seen one sunset, haven’t you pretty much seen ’em all?”

Every once in a while, for a moment or two I wish that that were true. Happily, though, in fact, the situation is more difficult, more ... complicated.

Update on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 08:56AM by BVD

This was the scene as I worked on the painting.

The added element here has to do with the fact that Flint is deathly afraid of thunderstorms, and thinks that staying close to me will afford him some measure of protection. So I was a little bit hindered by the 65-pound foxhound at my feet.

I don’t have any one system or protocol for painting skies – it all depends on the situation. This one was a little unusual in that I had almost completely finished the ‘foreground’ – the gray clouds that had been nearest, above my head – before doing the rest, including the cerulean/gray horizon I’m working on here. I’m painting on an Arches cold-pressed watercolor block, 18 x 24, with margins taped to yield 16 x 20.

And yes, the entire house is filled with sunrise/sunset canvases like those in the background.