Sunset, Friday, 18 December 2009

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

This is the beginning of what it appears will be the first major snowstorm in years for central Virginia east of the Blue Ridge. Big snows for Washington northward (and westward in the Shenandoah Valley) have just meant a mess of sleet and freezing rain here, making Charlottesville’s alleged average annual snowfall of around 18 inches seem like a cruel joke to us kids who want to get out of school. Seriously, over the last 10 years I’ve begun to think our winter climate was pretty much that of ... I don’t know ... northern Georgia.

After sunset I was in the middle of the woods, using the last moments of light to cut firewood where part of an oak had crashed down a few years ago. I was looking at the snow coming down through the trees and thinking about the color tones you can see behind snow. Sometimes it’s violet or lilac, sometimes a sort of cobalt blue, or even an orange or a red, and a background of trees can add a strangely warm umber.

A master at painting atmosphere of all kinds was Childe Hassam. I’ve mentioned before the impression that his “Late Afternoon, New York, Winter” made on me when I saw it at The Brooklyn Museum. It’s apparently on exhibit there now, on the fifth floor. Surprisingly, a shot of the painting at another site seems more accurate to the color I remember than the museum’s own photo. But snow is tricky, whether out in the weather or on a canvas; basically, you can see it as almost any color you like.

Sunset, Thursday, 17 December 2009

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

Wrestling today with a makeshift photo lighting setup – lights had to be sent back to the vendor for replacement – I contemplated the prospect of not being able to post the paintings at all (if they didn’t look halfway accurate).

The funny thing about that was how it made it more difficult to follow the usual discipline of painting – yet I painted sunsets for years while I wasn’t able to show them to anyone. Now I’m spoiled almost to the point of not being able to do them without you.

The sky this afternoon, until the sun fell, seemed all one color, a bluescape. I decided it was monoromantic.

Sunset, Tuesday, 8 December 2009

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

I expect we all have missing or unfinished ‘works’, in whatever medium – painting, music, writing, home renovation, business, housework, cooking ... Hey, I just realized those weren’t just hypothetical examples, I qualify for all of them! Sad ...

Anyway, the Missing Works are usually the greatest, of course, since they live only in imagination and have never been made physically real. Today started with one: a painting of the sunrise. I also ‘saw’ two paintings of the mid-morning sky, but there was time only for the sunset, now that the clouds have come and we’re getting pelted with sleet.

The sunrise had a bright green sky close to the horizon on the right, or toward the south, just a bit of open sky above the low dark humped backs of the nearby Southwest Mountains. Toward the center and left clouds reaching up over the mountains were flame colors with slight ‘imperfections’ of dark, dull or whitish streaks that only made the colors seem more intense – burnished gold, golden rose, and a shade I’m not sure has a name but a gold-rose-magenta, all of which, in the painting, might have started as different combinations of Rose Madder Lake and Naples Yellow but then other colors would have needed to come in, brighter yellows, whites, crimsons, until the strange alchemy might be complete. And since this work is missing, I can assure you it was quite complete.

Above this horizon, higher clouds were veils of violet dust screening a sky of several interpenetrated blue pigments that, though still subdued and dark, burst out something like a deep drumbeat of the morning, just beginning. And since this is a missing work, I can assert that the sound could actually be heard in the painting.

Sunset, Tuesday, 24 November 2009

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

Depth perception: As previously mentioned, this painter’s is not the best. No need for alarm – my misperceptions were all at a distance of over 70 yards and didn’t involve the traffic I was in – but out on the road today trees and houses exchanged places, distant trucks were in front of, no, they were beyond traffic lights, brake lights were behind a fence, until it turned out they weren’t.

A question is, which came first, the feeling that all things are one, or the visual impression? I have an answer – and it involves more detailed autobiography than anybody really wants to know. But I’d like to think the most acute vision could be consistent with my universalist fuzztone.

On an unexpectedly related note, painting isn’t the easiest just after throwing ten-foot lengths of black walnut out of a shed, running a chain saw, splitting the rounds, and stacking the wood. Call me a 170-pound weakling – my arms are a little shaky. But maybe disability, if we can call it that, offers aesthetic opportunity. Not that these things have to be mutually exclusive, but perhaps any degree of inability to be precisely ‘objectively accurate’ encourages one to try to be honest instead.

Sunset, Thursday, 19 November 2009

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

Rain pouring down this morning prompted a strange dream sequence of thoughts – or what our friend E. A. Poe might have termed a ‘fancy’ – speculating on what happens to the rain when it falls – if it remembers in some way, in any sense at all, how it fell, and its life in the sky, as it sinks into the ground or runs off in streams, earthbound – if the rain ever knows any sense of returning when it rises as vapor, burned up by the sun, pulled up into clouds – if the same generations of rain ever return to form the same clouds, if only for an instant, if only as a sport. And if I could perhaps catch them at it.

Although I don’t believe visual evidence is needed for any painting, I did see bands of blue and violet tonight, as afterimages of a pervasive gray. Still raining at sunset.

Sunset, Monday, 9 November 2009

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

I was so happy to have found the original version of “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto, I had to play it on a loop while I was doing this painting.

Then again – lucky for me this business of painting a sunset in real time doesn’t take more than 10 or 12 plays.

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Carcass of a fox twisted, wrapped around itself by the side of the road. Then, right after that, a flattened cardboard box. The soggy corrugated skin of the fox is nothing like what it was before. Does the fox care? I’m sure it did, for a moment there – in which I would have gladly reversed all laws of motion, contained everything, and sealed it up, for this fox. And all. While I go rattling down the road in my container.