Sunset, Friday, 29 January 2010

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

Perhaps a little snow in the offing. 

This was one of those days when water freezes in the ground and makes magic little ice caverns, or castles, underfoot – dense combs of gleaming, finely striated vertical ice crystals, just an inch or two tall, pushing up the red mud.

When I was a kid and encountered these on the walk to school, they seemed amazing. There was that sense of having discovered something new – I mean, really new – had anyone ever seen such a thing? After all, no one had ever said to me, “Listen, someday you’re going to run into these magic ice crystals in the mud – don’t get too excited, we already know about them.”

Quite a few things appeared that way – enormous roots bulging out of a creek bank might have been the most spectacular sight of its kind, for all I knew – and had anyone else ever been to this spot in the woods ... in all of human history? My brother Steve and I would find things like that and, like all great explorers, give them names. An abandoned gravel pit far off in the woods – I’m not sure how we managed to consider an abandoned pit something new, exciting and exclusively ours, but that was Frying Pan Canyon. An arena custom-made for throwing rocks.

Even something new only in the sense that it happened to be in a transient state or condition could feel like a discovery. If a bit of swamp froze over enough to allow a rare game of ice hockey – slapping a pine knot around with broken branches – that day of a frozen swamp qualified as something like an unprecedented and perhaps unrepeatable miracle.

Today by the Rivanna, after this week’s floods, Flint and I walked through large areas of woods that had been under water. Along the banks everything was covered in a heavy layer of silt (marbled with what looked like black sand – topsoil?) and small trees nearest the river were plastered all over their skinny branches with papier-mâché handfuls of leaves, twigs and mud. Flint was excited by the fresh stratum of earth; to a scent hound, it seems when there’s any new covering on the ground – snow, or in this case silt – it’s not so much that a place has changed in one aspect, the geography of scent is so different it’s an entirely new place.

Finding all the changes wrought by the flood, and being the first and perhaps only one to see them, at least here, was like the first time seeing ice in the mud. To be discovering things is very fine.

Sunset, Monday, 25 January 2010

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

Out today after last night’s deluge and the resulting floods, it was easy to see in the untracked mud that no one else had been in the “back thousand acres” of this place where we rent – in fact no one’s been back there since deer hunting ended three weeks ago.

(The Rivanna at flood, by the way, was amazing to see, close-up in the woods.)

The first thing I thought (smug) was, wow, I guess these guys never come back here if they can’t shoot at deer. But then I realized, wait a minute, what if we hadn’t gotten Flint (the foxhound), who needs to run? How often would we come back here – how often did we come here, before we found him (late 2001) at the Fluvanna County SPCA, convinced by the shelter’s benign speculation that he was a mellow half-Lab?

Answer: Almost never.

It’s not just hunters. A lot of us need another reason, or we just don’t seem to get out much anymore.

Sunset, Friday, 13 November 2009

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

Out on the long walk today, the rains having let up but the breezes still blowing from the trailing remnants of the storm (The Monster Nor’Easter That Ate Hurricane Ida), the woods and fields weren’t too wet – you could walk through the overgrown fields of pine without getting soaked by the turnstiles of the lower boughs. On the jeep trail plastered with oak leaves, with the air beginning to turn a little milder, there was a strangely pleasant vista of almost nothing but fallen light brown leaves converging ahead with the light gray sky – duotone all the way (except the occasional scrubby evergreen in the margins of the woods made it more like a tritone). Because of all the rain and wind we’ve been having (it’s raining again, very close to sunset – this storm doesn’t know the word quit), something about this ordinarily very dull vision of brown and gray felt happy and bright. As Flint and I got down toward the Rivanna, we heard the railroad at the Preddy Creek crossing less than a mile downstream – a singular definite roar I took to mean an Amtrak passenger train, versus the bumpy and elongated rumble of a freight.

I’ve seen many admirable paintings of this kind of dim gray-brown late fall or winter scene, but something is missing in them generally. It’s true that in what I saw and heard, nowhere was there visual evidence of any bright color – a broad swath of brilliant red or a line of electric turquoise. Yet it was there – I saw it anyway. My advice is, don’t let November fool you.

Sunset, Monday, 21 September 2009

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

I think I might be issuing my final report of the year about sumac, having opened this little can of mysteries in two posts, on July 29th and August 5th. As I have previously observed, sumac is quite the hot topic ... somewhere ... maybe. I actually did receive one note of appreciation from a reader who, while I guess she didn’t describe herself as an outright fan or aficionado of sumac, at least didn’t consider the subject to be beneath notice. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she didn’t seem to consider it beneath the standards of this blog.

Anyway, today on my walk with Flint, as we got down near the [Rivanna] river, in the so-called Scrubby Field, I realized that the ubiquitous sumac trees or bushes had gone through many of their changes for the coming autumn, including their leaves beginning to turn bright red. In the plants that had originally caught my attention – which turned out to be the females – with their flower clusters changing from small green dots to magenta buds emerging out of gold petals – the clusters had over the past several weeks turned a sort of violet raspberry, then a deep red grape, and now a dark rust red. In the middle of that sequence, the buds seemed plumped with life, with a vibrant slightly waxy sheen. They still retain some of that healthy shine.

Meanwhile, you might recall I was beginning to realize the fields were also filled with male plants, with clusters that looked generally similar to the others at first, except instead of fat furled buds these were rather simple yellow flowers, each with five gold stamens. At one point during August I couldn’t walk through the field without wading through shoulder-high braces of yellow sumac laden with buzzing bumblebees and honeybees, the bees stuck all golden underneath with pollen.

With the passing weeks it became clear that the male flowers were being pretty much devastated and laid low by the pollen harvest, while the female sumac clusters were attaining the height of their beauty. I really don’t want to give Camille Paglia any more reason to gloat, but the guy flowers were wasted – looking literally burnt down to dark nubs.

Now the male sumac trees have no flowers at all, and the female trees are showing the shaggy dark red clusters so familiar in autumn.

And since there’s an obvious male-female subtext to this story, I can’t resist mentioning one more thing. Weeks after I ‘discovered’ these (to me) exotic sumac phenomena down by the river, about three miles from the house, I found that the whole time we had both kinds of sumac right outside the entrance to our front yard, where I had passed them every day without noticing.

Which illustrates (perhaps) that Man (or man) will sometimes pay attention to things only when they’re found elsewhere, at a distance, and miss them if they’re right in front of him.

Hear, hear! (Here, here.)

Full Moon and Jupiter, Thursday, 6 August 2009

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

This was just before midnight. The Southwest Mountains would normally be visible under a bright moon, but dense fog over the Rivanna River in the distance completely obscured them.

Sunset, Wednesday, 29 July 2009

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

I’ve spent part of the last few walks with Flint looking at sumac. Today I was investigating a little bit of a sumac puzzle, a mystery perhaps only a painter would find mysterious. A color mystery.

This was in a place Laura and I dubbed the Scrubby Field – because – it’s – scrubby. (Most of our names for things around here are pretty much on this level: the Muddy Road [muddy], the Woods Road [in the woods], the Big Field [big], etc.) A field just above the north fork of the Rivanna River. Eight or so years ago it looked as if someone had perhaps cleared parts of it expressly for bird hunters – wide lanes were cleared and covered with tall grasses, alternating with areas of thick brush. Now everything’s overgrown (hence the name). One of the most successful overgrowers is sumac – bushes verging on trees, some approaching a height of 20 feet.

In late summer and fall the clusters of small sumac berries, if that’s the right word for them, will be the distinctive velvety dark scarlet. I always assumed this was staghorn sumac, but apparently true staghorn sumac doesn’t grow this far south. What we have is a cousin, scarlet sumac. Native Americans apparently had many uses for sumac, and I once tried to make tea from the clusters, following some Boy Scout instructions, by sealing them up in water, in a closed jar in the hot sun. Didn’t work.

Right now all the sumac clusters are in one stage or another of a visually interesting transition I’d never noticed before. Some clusters are still very immature, the fruit looks like tiny light green dots. What began to get my attention lately was the next stage, as the buds turned almost the color of ripe wheat waving in the breeze, although, with the remaining green undertone, they seemed more like the color of gold grapes.

Now, the color change I couldn’t understand, the beautiful golden clusters, as I saw so many across the field, seemed like they were turning a dull brown, as if they were drying up. This made no sense. This muddy autumnal brown didn’t look like it could possibly be a phase of any progression to brilliant deep red.

I looked closer – in fact, I had to look very closely. There actually was no dull brown in any part of the sumac. What I was seeing was the opening of tiny outer petals – gold, curling back like miniature wood shavings – and then, through the petals, the inner berry. The berries are two colors of pink, like a furled rosebud of a species developed to be mostly soft, light violet-pink with an edge of strong deep magenta. I don’t know if this inner berry in any way actually opens or unfurls, but at the moment it looks as though it would, and show more of the deep color.

So the off brownish sumac that looked like a result of two colors that can’t mix, was an illusion. The artist didn’t intend for us to see it that way.