Sunset, Thursday, 4 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.58°F at 8:30 p.m.

Honeysuckle winter might be that little period in the first week of June when an improvident painter who heats his house exclusively with a woodstove finds himself operating a chain saw in heavy rain while watching a socked-in sunset.

Tonight behind the grays I used asphaltum, transparent earth yellow, sepia and brown-pink, along with radiant violet. So, if it looks like there’s no earth in this painting ... that’s not entirely true.

Sunset, Saturday, 16 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.A line of thunderstorms arrived at sunset, and the rain hit just afterward. Laura was taking photos; I’ve posted one – not nearly her best shot of the night, but the one closest to what I was seeing, here.

Sunset, Thursday, 14 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.A soft muted evening, still in the 70s, the sky thinking about gathering up some rain. A skinny beautifully orange fox had come halfway through the yard when I stepped outside – it immediately turned and long-tailed it back into the fields. Pi, our youngest and smallest cat, was sitting on the outside bench, 15 yards from where the fox had been, an animated balloon above her head displaying a big bold exclamation point and, I thought, a question mark to go with it. Luckily, Stokey, 17 years old, was inside and not on hand to battle for his turf – as he did three years ago in an epic struggle that I witnessed and will eventually have to tell you about in all its remarkable detail. Upstairs, our pound-rescued foxhound peacefully slumbered.

Sunset, Wednesday, 6 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.Rain, and the world in back of the house – the long field leading down to the same arc of woods seen in most of these views – resembling a silvery fogged-up terrarium. Which struck me as funny the moment I thought of it, because what would the earth normally resemble more than a terrarium?

Sunset, Sunday, 3 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Raining tonight, and the “cracked bells and washed-out horns” of a wet northeast wind (just across my right shoulder, in this view) made me wonder how I might handle the painting – or, to continue with the song, what the silver saxophones might say to do. 

The rose tone behind, or within, the rain is something I first picked up from Childe Hassam’s “Late Afternoon, Winter, New York, 1900” – a famous painting of a snowstorm that I saw in a book I was given in 1972 (I still have the book).

My response to a sky of apparently nothing but gray is much different now than it was the first time I encountered it in this series, on June 28th, 1995, a painting I’ve posted, not for its own merits, which are very few, but as a point of departure. After that painting I began to realize that the series really emerges most on nights of a “non-sunset” sky. 

That 1995 painting, by the way, came after days of rain, and one day after the great Rapidan flood, which you can read about in rather technical but awe-inspiring detail here and here.

Sunset, Thursday, 30 April 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

The rain was about to end, a problem because no one had been able to figure out what made it rain in the first place. The weather was confusing. Could have been a massive collision between swine flu and the Supreme Court. First-time unemployment claims were known to contribute to the formation of clouds. God knows, we needed the rain – another theory.

If the sky was so dark, how could the woods be so bright? Perhaps it was like the buzzing in those cheap rheostats in an IKEA lamp – you try to turn the light down, not only does the indicator light come on, the whole thing starts humming like an interstate highway in the middle distance. Sky down, woods up.

Some feared the trees might be turning into paint – which later proved true.

On the twenty-fifth rainy day, contests were held in elementary schools asking how many different kinds of gray could be seen in the sky. The winner identified more than three hundred distinct variations, including blue, yellow, and red.