Sunset, Thursday, 11 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The other day I mentioned the California artist Lauren McMullen in connection with meditation and painting. Now that I’ve had a real chance to look through McMullen’s work, I feel I should add that whatever kind of meditation she does, it must work really well. I was drawn first to her collages, including one on “Dreams” and another, “Skully,” featuring a skull. They’re both beautifully layered, subtle and, like all the best work, endlessly absorbing.

I admit “Skully” made me laugh because my first thought was of Vin Scully, the (very) longtime voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

I’ll also admit that when I saw McMullen’s watercolors in thumbnail, they seemed sort of ‘light’, perhaps like something on the order of colored pencil sketches. When I viewed them large, I saw I’d been 100% wrong. They’re deep and dark and intensely brilliant at the same time. Her design sense and color instincts seem unerring. “Las Olas,” part painting, part graphic, should be adopted as an official poster for Costa Rica.

Sunset, Tuesday, 9 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Snow started an hour before sunset. I heard today from an artist in northern California, Lauren McMullen, who uses a formal method of meditation to still her ‘critical mind’. I don’t do that, but I know getting to that open or free state of mind is important. Among many things that work for me is watching the snow as it falls.

Sunset, Monday, 8 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I’ve never taken the advice one frequently sees, or receives, to “Breathe” or “Breathe Deeply,” or be sure to take deep breaths – never taken these very seriously. But when you consider the alternative to breathing, it does give you pause.

I’m beginning to think it’s a great idea. If anyone ever wants to use one of these skies as a sort of daily token or reminder to stop – and breathe – that’s wonderful by me.

Sunset, Tuesday, 22 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Shipwrecked as I am on a thousand-acre island of snow, my car with the clutch I foolishly burned up now blocking the ‘driveway’ (quarter-mile dirt lane) and inaccessible in the snow to tow trucks, I walked several miles along the side of four-lane U.S. 29 to get to a store. Following my Boy Scout training, I walked facing the traffic, which was rushing just two feet or so to my right. Now and then I hopped up onto a plowed snowbank to give tractor-trailers the respect they so fully deserve. Only a few drivers stayed conspicuously at speed or on message and peppered me with plowed slush.

The scale of life is so different on foot.

U.S. 29 is pretty much an antipedestrian landscape. No sidewalks, of course. Usually if you see anyone along the road it’s the itinerant homeless. But I was one of the few, the proud, the marooned.

I took a cab home (a first in my years in Virginia) – I really didn’t want to be the husband who incinerated the clutch one day and then, impaired by four shopping bags, got plowed into a snowbank by an oncoming SUV the next. More precisely, I had the cab take me to a dropoff point where I met Laura and we only had to carry the bags about a mile, through the fields.

(Critics/observers of this site will have noted that I thought the problem with the clutch last night was ice, but it turned out to be fire. You know how that poem ends.)

The ride back in the taxi gave me a further chance to reflect on this difference in perspective between being stuck here on the ground, as G. Lightfoot wrote, or zipping along in a vehicle. On my right, in the east above the Southwest Mountains, the sky at the horizon was a rare and perhaps indescribable blue that you almost never see except opposite the sun. It’s a sky that seems more illusory than distant – like robin’s egg blue, except not as brilliant and more delicately transparent. In the blue were a few vague shards of gray, their indistinct outlines adding to the impression of something not quite really there.

It struck me how an arresting moment like that would be much the same for a person standing in a field, traveling in a car, taking a train, or looking up out of the kitchen window. It’s a stillpoint. The still image is the hub of the wheel.

Sunset, Friday, 11 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Not to get things totally confused – only just a little confused – the following refers to the song titled, depending on where you look, “Have I Told You Lately” and “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” written by Van Morrison. The former title helps distinguish Morrison’s 1989 song from the 1945 standard (“Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?”), which it resembles in outward form although not so much in essence.

In addition, the version that inspired me to write is the one Morrison does with The Chieftains, a performance with a lot less orchestral decor than the better-known record.

There’s a love that’s divine
And it‘s yours and it’s mine
And it shines like the sun
At the end of the day
We shall give thanks and pray to the one

I’m not sure if Van means “the one,” “the One” or “The One,” but – it’s all the same to me.

Where the song really kills comes right after this. Just like the old standard, the song opens with the title line, “Have I told you lately that I love you?” – in the usual from-me-to-you format. But at the end of this verse Morrison adds two words – barely noticeable, just there if you want to notice them – that connect back to, and transform, the title.

. . . At the end of the day
We shall give thanks and pray to the one
And say
Have I told you lately that I love you?