Sunset, Tuesday, 16 February 2010

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

Cutting wood (again! – one of the drawbacks of renting an uninsulated farmhouse) in the hour before sunset, I was watching an ever bigger and more golden sun drop through the clouds and thinking – oddly enough, for the first time – about the difference, if there is one, between painting space (a scene, a person, a thing) and painting time (like the sunset).

I looked away from the sun and noticed, down a narrow park-like draw that forms a stream and leads into the woods, that most of a cedar had been broken in two by the snows – one tall half of the canopy lay to the left of a shattered remaining ten feet of trunk, and the other side, just as tall, had fallen to the right.

The snow split the tree. The sun split day and night. And I still couldn’t articulate the difference, if there is one, between painting space and painting time.

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, Saturday, 6 February 2010

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

The sun broke through for a couple of moments before sunset, and the snow ended. We had sleet all last evening and so did not quite get the full Middle Atlantic Snow Event – a mere 16 inches here.

Clouds came back for sunset but the ceiling had lifted enough to show a little bit o’ Blue Ridge.

Often in painting snow sunsets like Tuesday’s and these last three nights, it’s a question of looking at what seems to be a gray-white sky and waiting for the undertone or after-image color to suggest itself. Or I’ll begin the painting on a seemingly perverse impulse – as on Thursday, lay down a thin mix of cadmium red, rose madder, azo orange and cadmium yellow, with the thought, “Let’s see how we get out of this one ...”

Sunset, Friday, 8 January 2010

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

Something like the big blue sky of high summer, today we had our version of high winter – deep and unforgiving, more wind than sky. Strangely, evening on such a day often brings a huge gold sun and then a band of violet-rose. The colors seem so close to spring, in general, the artist has to look to the temperature of his paints, or the picture may resemble a Parisian twilight in an old ad for Guerlain. Which might not be so bad.

Update on Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 09:09AM by BVD

Traveling for a couple of days – sunsets for Saturday and Sunday may not show up here until Monday.

Sunset, Friday, 1 January 2010

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

I’ve tried to describe, a few times now, how often I have to move all around the place here to really see the sunset, and then basically put together a composite of several views. Lately I ran into someone’s account of almost exactly the same process, and, quelle surprise, this guy Proust tells it pretty well.

Only his problem isn’t steadily growing woods in the foreground, he’s traveling by train, and at dawn he “glimpsed, in the windowpane, above a little black copse, serrated clouds of downy softness in a shade of immutable pink.”

“Soon,” he says, “great reserves of light built up behind [the pink]. They brightened further, spreading a blush across the sky; and I stared at it through the glass, straining to see it better, as the color of it seemed to be privy to the profoundest secrets of nature.”

Ah, but then the train changes directions –

and I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, till I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.

Sunset, Saturday, 19 December 2009

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

About 20 inches of snow later, here we are. Interesting how the color of the snow changes in the depth of the storm, from all the fugitive tints I was talking about yesterday to a sort of deep silver.

Once again we had firewood chores, and I cut and then Laura and I carried wood through the drifts from a shed about 100 yards or so away. Before that, she took this shot of another of the landlord’s neglected sheds, near our front yard:

Laura Owen Sutherland

As we were going down to the other ‘barn’ to get the wood, we looked back at the house:

Laura Owen Sutherland

The strange glow – in the same direction as my sunset view – comes from the GE Fanuc facility about a mile away on Route 29.