Del Ankers, Photographer, Part 2

Copyright © Maria Elizabeth Freire

Del Ankers (see sunset post from today as well as the two entries below this one) photographed all the presidents from FDR through Nixon, but I think it’s significant that the one he seems to have gotten on with in a personal way was Harry S. Truman.

According to Del, Truman was supposed to sit in the Oval Office for as long as it took a sculptor to do studies and sketches necessary for his official bust. Truman couldn’t stand the idea of wasting all that time, and had Del take a 360° series of photos for the sculptor to use instead.

At one White House event, the Associated Press photographer was too inebriated to function.

“Ankers,” Mr. Truman reportedly said, “could you take the shot for this fella? I’d hate to see the poor s.o.b. lose his job just because he had too many martinis at lunch.”

Copyright © Maria Elizabeth Freire

It’s very difficult to convey Del’s combination of glamour and complete unselfconsciousness – a unique blend of Bedford, Virginia, country boy and Washington man about town. I believe the actor he’s kidding around with here is Duncan Renaldo, who had played the Cisco Kid for many years – although by this time, the series was history (it ended in 1956) and it appears the actor was doing a commercial for “Pro-tek-tiv Children’s Shoes.” And Del had started his film business, Rodel. This photo isn’t the greatest, but it does convey something of the Del Ankers I knew.

Predawn, Inauguration Day

Laura took this shot as we arrived at the Iwo Jima memorial before 6 a.m. on January 20th, 2009. It’s funny to think tonight of how cold it was then. The memorial was the vantage point for several paintings of the Inauguration Day sunrise, such as the two at the top of the page here, and several more in the gallery.

Del died May 15th, 2008, at his home in Great Falls, and I visited with him for the last time, three days earlier. I know Del would have enjoyed the inauguration sunrise/sunset project, and the way things turned out. May 2008 was near the end of the presidential primaries. The last words I remember from him: “I’m so sick of all this Obama and Clinton crap!”

Del Ankers, Photographer, Part 1

Copyright © Maria Elizabeth Freire

Tonight’s main post (August 1st) refers to my uncle Del Ankers, who was born on this date in 1916. The photos here aren’t meant to even try to do justice to his life, personality and career – which is why I’ve included links to both the obit and a special remembrance in the Washington Post – but rather they’re meant to celebrate a little connection between his experience and mine, something he might have enjoyed.

In Del’s photo above, the sculptor of the Iwo Jima memorial, Felix de Weldon, is showing the work in his studio to a visiting class of students.

(U.S. elementary school students of a certain era, note the ‘safety patrol’ badges on a couple of the kids.)

I believe the Marines in the sculpture here are positioned just the way they are now, in Arlington.

Copyright © Maria Elizabeth Freire

In this shot of de Weldon modeling the head of one of the Marines (and no, I don’t know if this is one of the veterans of Mount Suribachi, although I guess it’s possible), I’ve always thought the face at this stage resembles Paul McCartney a little more than it does the guy sitting there.

The funny thing was, when Laura and I got to the memorial before dawn on Inauguration Day (see next post, above), and looked up into those bronze faces, as finished by de Weldon and as seen from below the likeness was uncanny. We could recognize de Weldon’s, and Del’s, subject immediately.

Birthday, Brothers, Baseball . . .

I’ve decided to depart from my norm and show a little home movie from my birthday lunch in Frederick. (Birthday is later ... think ‘Marseillaise’ ...)

The lunch, at Volt, was terrific. The restaurant surprised me with an ice cream that I thought had a suspicious resemblance to the Tower of Babel (how did they know I wrote a blog?) with candle. It was sort of vanilla but turned out to be flavored with orange mint.

I figure the candle was for the ‘1’ in ‘61’ and, from my p-o-v, the candle flame, sort of as in Roger Maris’s home run record, was an asterisk. (As in *Hey, not really ...)

Out in front of the restaurant, we did a little self-portrait: my sister-in-law Sandra Ashley Van Doren, my brother Steve, me, and my much better half, Laura Owen Sutherland.

Sandy and Steve are the greatest. Steve and I are 16 months apart and have always been essentially a team – I sometimes think that together we make a well-balanced personality. Individually, well ...

They gave me just what I’d asked for: Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, by Larry Tye. This of course is the story of Satchel Paige. Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox this year is the second-oldest player to make his first All-Star team, at age 42; Paige was the oldest, in 1952, at the age of 46, “after,” as MLB.com puts it, “years of dominance in the Negro Leagues.” (That’s one way to put it.)

Steve had not yet inscribed it, so I had a special request. When I was in Pony League (ages 13–15), the manager of the Lorton Fire Department team, Graham Davis, decided based on my Little League experience that I might make a good pitcher. He even got me a warmup jacket – flame red with a big gold ‘L’, which I got to keep (and kept for centuries), even though I never pitched in a game.

When Mr. Davis tried me out, at the Lorton Reformatory stadium, with its old wooden covered grandstands, well-tended grounds and my first real pitcher’s mound, I immediately got frustrated and started firing pitches all the way to the backstop. End of pitching career. (I was a notorious hothead. We once had to stop a sandlot game for 30 minutes to search the woods for my glove.)

I asked Steve if he would inscribe it, ‘Graham Davis should have given you another chance.’

This would have been nice, coming from Steve. Even though I did fine and ended up in center, Steve came along a couple years later, hit .521 and broke every record they had.

He inscribed my book: ‘Graham Davis had it right!’

Looking at the Sunset (Part 6)

What I’ve been working up to in this series of posts on ‘Looking at the Sunset’ is two-fold. The immediate purpose and impulse is just to talk about how my view of the sunset – literally the view, what you can see from here – has changed in the more than 14 years since I started. But I find I can’t really describe that without getting into how this began and where it’s going.

I didn’t much notice or care about sunsets and sunrises until not long before I began this series in 1995. It had never occurred to me to paint one, and I’d been painting for more than 25 years. And this is despite the fact that, in Batesville, Virginia, at a place called Port-a-Ferry Farm, the tiny ‘country villa’ I rented for seven years until 1990 had a truly spectacular western view of the Blue Ridge.

But by mid-1993, I was coming to the end of a relatively dark couple of years – sort of like waking up from a long low-grade nightmare. Part of the waking up was sitting outside and watching the sun go down. This was at a house I rented on a farm just four miles from where I’m living now, in the Stony Point area of Albemarle; the rickety narrow side deck offered a great view of the sunset.

Then I moved to Glendale, off Scuffletown Road in Orange County – another rental, but a 400-acre farm where my nearest neighbors were one mile in any direction. (Have I mentioned being a bit of a recluse?) Believe it or not, this was the view from my front door:

Glendale, 1995. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48.

However, that view was to the east, and even though there were some beautiful sunrises, my state of mind early in the morning tended to be more one of just trying to wake up than of reveling in the wonders of the world. To the west, in back of the house, a large wooded hill reared up and blocked out the sunset. To my surprise, I found this kind of irritating – I hadn’t reckoned on not seeing sunsets or on caring whether or not I did. I even went to the trouble a few times of climbing the hill to see what I could see, but couldn’t see much.

After one year, in May 1995, Glendale had been ‘sold out from under me’ – as we powerless renters like to say. I found the place where I’m living now, back again in Stony Point, in Albemarle County. (I met Laura six months later and we’ve been living here since we married in June 1997. Our nearest neighbor is much closer than mine were at Glendale; but then, this is the only house on more than 1,000 acres.)

One of the first things I noticed, just after moving in, was the sunset from the back yard. The sun went down behind wall-to-wall Blue Ridge – big sky, big earth. Soon I started thinking I should just go out and paint the sunset.

Part of the motivation – the part that didn’t come simply from the view itself – was that I was only an occasional painter – or better put, as they say in baseball, a streaky one – and strangely slow and deliberate. I would start out fast, and in those initial hours seem to come very close to something exciting and finished, then settle into months of elaboration – glazings and subtle revisions – which might work out very well, yet the result would not have quite the same energy I’d started with. I was like a general who carries the field right up to the adversary’s HQ, but then stops and digs trenches. Given that situation, the sunset seemed like a way almost to trick myself into painting more often and painting more freely and quickly.

In a sense, I started painting the sunset because, here, I could see it – ‘because it was there.’ I think the part of my impulse that I tend to discount is how my relationship with this fundamental daily fact of life had already affected me. That’s an aspect of the series that I’m still uncovering.

On top of the simple decision to paint sunsets there’s the further question of painting them every single day, which I didn’t start doing til September 1997. When I was painting my first sunsets, in June 1995, a visitor suggested perhaps doing them every day. It sounded crazy – or actually not so much crazy as scary, because of the commitment involved – but I didn’t want to mention that I’d already thought of that. I just didn’t quite have the nerve to start, or maybe I didn’t yet see the sense in it – or sense the sense in it, because the sense is difficult to see outright.

So, back in 1995, the sunset here was pretty plain to see; after all, that’s what prompted me to start. The sweep of the old view is suggested by this very small painting of the sunset of June 21st, 1996, less than 24 hours after the summer solstice:

Sunset, 21 June 1996. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 4 x 6.

What’s funny to me is how much the view of the sunset here has changed, how difficult that sometimes makes things – and, in the end, how little it may matter.

I’ve alluded to this change in the view in my posts about the volunteer peach tree and my sketch of the back yard. Since 1995, all sorts of trees and bushes have sprung up along the back: the volunteer peach, a box elder that’s growing a mile a minute, a ‘tree of paradise’ (ailanthus) just behind it that seems to be growing even faster, a volunteer peach tree that isn’t a peach tree just to the left of the box elder (its fruit are more like nectarines but I’m not sure, and they’re exuberantly exuding clear sap), and a sour cherry (aka pie cherry) just in front and to the left of that. These are in addition to the big red oak in the right corner of the yard, a big white oak in the field behind that, a tall dark cedar in the field in the middle of the view, and a truly enormous venerable white oak to the left of the cedar.

(Sorry to go on in so much detail about the contents of our back yard – but I’ve spared you the really picky little details!)

In any case, that trees grow is hardly surprising. What I never thought about, and wasn’t prepared for, was how “the woods” in aggregate get so much taller in what seems like such a short time.

Here’s a funky little schematic of the current view:

Pencil on paper, 5.25 x 8.75.

(The “garden in ruins” – a big circular space that normally would have at least 30 heirloom tomato plants plus basil, Italian parsley, beans, okra, Florence fennel, cucumbers, sweet peppers, etc. – is a testament to the time demands of blogging and, perhaps even more, to the psychic diversions of hoping any day to find a place we can buy and call our own.)

The kicker – the sockdolager in all of this (just had to use that weird crazy word, which I’ve only ever seen once, in a manuscript by an old friend, Bill Crandall) – the most important factor in this changing view is the woods. I guess I always just thought the woods were what they were – the woods, mature, pretty much unchanging.

But “the woods” must be jumping up quite a bit every year. Who knew?

Meanwhile, as for the growth of the mountains – not so much. In fact, I hear the Appalachians have been taking it on the chin for something like 60 million years.

The result, visually, is that I can’t see as much of what’s going on, or can’t see as easily, as I could at the beginning, resulting in the little dance I once described, in which I sometimes have to bob and weave to see the sun. I may have to stand on the back porch steps to confirm whether or not the mountains are even visible in clouds or haze, and it may require repairing to various upstairs ‘observatories’ to see clearly just where along the mountains the sun is setting.

Now – I really wonder why I needed to tell you any of this, except by way of a sort of personal diary, which is exactly the sort of blog I knew from the outset I did not want this to be. One reason is to indicate that these paintings are somewhat more stylized than they may appear; my purpose has never been, primarily, to record or transcribe.

But further: I believe that somehow these paintings may have more to do with sunset as an event than with sunset as a picture. I suspect a perfectly legitimate series could be done without seeing the sun set – as long as it corresponded in a meaningful way to the event. In the end, like anything else in any of the arts, work stands simply on how and what it communicates.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking through the gap between the peach and the box elder.

Update on Monday, July 6, 2009 at 02:49PM by BVD

A little more orientation. Here’s the house:

Laura Owen Sutherland

The perspective for the sunset paintings is usually from directly in back of the house. Sunrise paintings are done from just about where Laura is standing for this shot, looking in the opposite direction. That’s the morning sun in the window. The big red oaks on either side of the house aren’t even mentioned in my schematic, they’re behind me in that sketch. Plus there are three equally large oaks above us here, not in the photo. 

Funny thing is, when the old-timers who used to either live here or see their relatives here drop in to visit the old house – and this has happened four times – they always start out the same way: “What happened to all the big trees?” (!!?)

(A fine poem about one of those visits – you have to click on “The Visit” – can be found here.)

Aerial view:

In summer, looking at the sunset means looking almost toward the upper left corner of this picture – or, from my perspective on the ground, toward my right (toward the north). The amphitheater-like curve of the trees in most of my sunsets comes from the fact that the trees are closest on the left and right of the back field, and that field falls away steeply in the middle.

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.