Sunset, Wednesday, 22 July 2009

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

Walking through a dense passage in the woods today, basically a long-overgrown jeep trail, almost everything a variation on green, plus sun and shade making two versions of each green, and having to keep my head down to get under or around all the young trees, I looked up and was startled by a blazing red sort of star resting on some bending branches of ironwood, just below eye level.

My very initial reaction, even though this thing was not magenta or orange, was, why would someone have tied a plastic property marker here of all places? In property terms, this was the middle of nowhere, almost but not quite by the river (north fork of the Rivanna) – maybe 50 yards shy of it.

Anyway, that was a fraction of a fraction of a second. The star was a fallen leaf of a Virginia creeper vine, already turned blazing scarlet with just a little residual green in a couple of places, a hint of red violet behind the scarlet, and missing one of its five long leaves. The young death of the leaf, its still supple shine, made the red that much more brilliant.

So, on further consideration, and because it was so completely different from everything else around it, the star on the ironwood looked like an asterisk, put there in the most attention-getting possible way. It looked even more like an asterisk than an asterisk normally does, because, with its color, it was literally so exceptional.

What would the footnote say, to which this asterisk referred. I figured with its autumn fire in high summer the creeper was indicating something about time.

*     *     *     *

I hope I don’t get wound up here in strained comparisons or become guilty of attempted poetry, but I couldn’t help thinking too about the sun. The ultimate bullet.

*     *     *     *

In trying to check against my identification of the ironwood (or hophornbeam) tree – leaves nearly like a beech but the young bark not pale, more steely gray – I had to settle for the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees. It’s helpful, but I was looking everywhere for one of my favorite discoveries, what I consider the best single tree identification source for this part of the world, Tree Finder: A Manual for the Identification of Trees By Their Leaves, by May Watts. One of the great pleasures of this book is its amazingly rigorous system, which allows for the differentiation of almost every eastern tree in a little pocket-sized guide – hardly bigger than a pamphlet – for $3.95.

Sunset, Wednesday, 8 July 2009

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

Out with Flint today (new visitors: Flint’s a pound-found foxhound, runs 10–15 or more miles while I walk about seven, cross-country) – I didn’t realize what a rare summer day it was until I had to come down off the embankment above the Rivanna to encourage him to go in and get a drink.

There’d been a gunshot in the distance somewhere across the way. He’d just gotten in the water, heard the shot, sort of stood there looking in its direction for a moment, then scrambled up the 20 feet or so to where I was standing. (He’s a gun-, thunder- and, probably safe to assume, whip-shy foxhound, which may be why he came to be at the pound.)

I decided that, after running in the heat, he’d better get some water, and, hoping there wouldn’t be any more shots, I found my way down to one of the sand bars on the river. Flint, feeling a little safer with me (as seen previously here), followed – and started walking around in the water, lapping it up as he went.

The view from river level was a revelation – partly because it’s so familiar. I’m so used to everything being kind of hazy at this time of year – the woods up and down the river arching from the banks and bluffs toward the water, the many sand bars and mud flats and the stranded trees stuck in various places by floods, but all of this more or less bonded by a subtle metallic veil of humidity. In typical light, even the river itself fails to separate, the view upstream or down, foreshortened at a low angle, opaque reflection – light bouncing into other light bounced everywhere by atmosphere.

It’s an effect I’ve loved since I was a kid and that I would deliberately exaggerate, blurring my eyes to make everything even more unified.

(“Please don’t throw me in that briar patch!”)

As much as I can revel in the murk, I was stunned by the Rivanna in the clear light of such a blue summer day. The shallow river was crystal clear, showing sand and silt-rock-leaf bottom like a brownish topaz. Every variation on the bottom, every bubble and wrinkle in the current showed itself. Trees all along the banks stood out in infinitely varied green relief and distinct perspective, not the usual moody mass. So vivid and fresh, the clarity of what I was seeing became part of the touch of the air, and the sensation of breathing.

Curiously, the sharp distinctions took nothing away from the ‘oneness’; if anything, they made it almost too much.

Watching the beautiful white dog walk in the water and drink it at the same time didn’t hurt, either.

The coolest moment came about an hour later when we made our second pass by the river – turned out Flint was somewhere in back of me on a ramble, or a chase, but I came to the edge of the embankment just in case I might find him down there. No dog, but through the foliage on the surface of the water the shadow of a large bird moving swiftly up the middle of the river. I looked up, wondering if I’d be able to make out what was casting the shadow. Through the leaves above my head, maybe 30 feet above the river’s surface, I caught a long look at a great blue heron flying through the light.

Sunset, Thursday, 18 June 2009

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

Concerning this painting, its soundtrack was a deer snorting about 20 times as it walked a half-circle in the field from the right into the center of this view. We tried to entertain Flint the foxhound by alerting him to the sound (he was inside ... reclining), but the same dog I’d seen yesterday chase a deer for a mile, weaving in and out of a wide swath of power line toward the Rivanna River, merely almost imperceptibly raised one brow as he tried to appraise whether what we were saying had anything to do with food.