Sunset, Tuesday, 6 October 2009

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

The heavy gray cloud ceiling created a room, and within that room we can have our sunset.

Sunset, Saturday, 26 September 2009

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

Out on a very wet seven-mile ramble with Flint the pound-found foxhound, even in, or especially in, the gray light I was seeing so many colors. (Flint meanwhile was more than doubling my mileage, chasing things I never saw and I’m not sure he saw, either.) Standing in the lonesome part of this place we call Abandon Alley – a wide swath of power line where you can see at least a mile of cut-over nothing in particular – with woods ranged along either side of a long, stepped descent to the river and an equally long rise to a blue-green field on the opposite height (strange, almost the exact color of oats in midsummer), I realized that if I were to try to name all the color variations I was seeing, it would go on forever – and I wouldn’t mind. Just naming variations on green and yellow would be enough – poplar yellow (or maybe that should be yellow poplar yellow), cedar green, distant patches sort of brown but actually dried weeds of a pinkish gold, and just at hand, clinging on a swaying head of deep goldenrod, a pale yellow moth. And so on.

But the best color encounter came later, in the middle of the woods. In that peculiar, even light of clouds and rain, I was stumped by the turning dogwood leaves – not yet the dark scarlet of mid-autumn, some were still green and some – a delicate shade of orange I realized I couldn’t describe. Couldn’t describe it then and I know I can’t describe it now without a little imaginative assistance from you. A fresh new bright pale orange with a subtle overtone of red and an undertone of something like cream. How was this happening?

I finally took a leaf – in fact, I ended up taking two, to look at a deeper variation on the theme. (To many native Virginians, although it’s – just – O.K. to take a dogwood leaf, if you break a branch or, God forbid, kill a tree ... you only hope nobody finds out.) And so I found the reason for my difficulty. On one side, the side that had been facing the light, each leaf was turning the familiar russet and almost violet red. But on the underside – still not penetrated with the red, the side facing me was a flat, neutral, almost colorless green. The effect was composite, from backlighted screens of scarlet and green. No wonder I couldn’t put a name to it. I do know that if they made a candy that soft orange color – like maybe a tropical fruit–flavored variety of Chuckles – it would be irresistible.

Rain all day – might have to turn the sky over to find the colors.

Sunset, Tuesday, 22 September 2009

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

Day 3 of the ‘Mostly Cloudy’ Sunset Hostage Standoff ... with rain.

Today’s the 12th anniversary of the first of the consecutive daily sunset paintings – 22 September 1997. Of course, today’s also the autumnal equinox, just as the 22nd was in 1997, the reason I had decided to start on that day.

I’d been painting sunsets and sunrises since 1995 and don’t remember any great deliberations, or any particular design or plan, behind the decision to try painting every day. I don’t think I understood, on any sort of conscious level, why I was doing it, which probably helps explain why, after I’d painted every sunset through the end of 1997 and then all of 1998, after New Year’s Day 1999, I stopped.

Even after starting again, on New Year’s Day 2006, I still don’t think I had any clear or explicit idea what the significance of this daily observance might be. I was painting largely on intuition.

You might say the paintings are a direct response to the days themselves. I painted the sunset because the sun was setting.

Sunset, Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.This by all rights (or maybe I should say by almost all rights, since I clearly didn’t comply) should be a silver-gray painting belonging to a day of rain from morning til night. The sunset sky was silver, gray and white in billows and shreds rising from lower left to upper right.

Out today with Flint, in the afternoon, the silver light filtered through the trees made the woods seem like a luminous room, everything so easy to see, the greens especially, running cedar on the dark floor, new beech leaves beneath the ceiling. Rain seemed to carry light down with it. The calm, even glow made me think of the atrium in the old wing of the National Gallery of Art, with its skylights and water pool.

When we came out of the woods into the big field Laura and I call the Gobi Desert – a lush green oval one-third by two-thirds of a mile, so named for the experience of crossing it on a thick hot summer day when you’ve already walked five miles – it was simply a much, much bigger, softly lighted silver room. 

Walking today was more like wading, thanks in part to the rain but also because of the tall uncut grass.

Then, when it was time to paint, I knew that the color I was seeing could best be described as Davys gray and white, but I was impelled to try something different. Without knowing why, I worked brown-pink, radiant violet and sepia into my initial white layer, then painted Davys and titanium white over that. It’s not literally the color but perhaps sometimes to get a certain color or a certain light, it’s best not to match color for color and light for light.

I was happier, at any rate, than if I had simply painted gray. And it just started raining harder.

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.

Sunset, Monday, 8 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.Rain and lightning over the Blue Ridge, headed this way.

Tomorrow morning we get up at 4 to go work as county election officials in our precinct, for the Virginia Democratic primary ... and they don’t let us out until after the polls close at 7 and we’ve recorded the votes. Any registered voter can participate, but these primaries usually mean a very light turnout. So I’ll have some time, and depending on how much sleep I can get, may be able to write and sketch for tomorrow night ...

For all you pollsters whose calls I never picked up, at the moment I’m leaning heavily toward Creigh Deeds.

Update on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 05:10AM by BVD

I might add that that’s exactly the kind of thing I can’t say, breathe, or in any other way indicate, once I’m in the polling place. Something to be thankful for, seriously.