Sunset, Thursday, 21 January 2010

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

Rain verging on sleet and snow – the approach of our old friend ‘wintry mix’.

I’m not sure anyone wants to see a rainy sunset on a wall calendar or, if today’s their birthday, receive a print of their special day as all gray. These are not merely commercial considerations – perhaps the time will come when I can find and show something of the inner nature of an outwardly dark day.

Sunset, Tuesday, 19 January 2010

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

Out in the fields/woods, while Flint chased what he contended was a fox, it was a transitional day – or a day that gave the illusion of transition. With a mild west breeze, it was more like margins of January and margins of March and April overlapped, throwing the day out of time. Patches of granular icy snow bordered lanes of thawed mud the more slippery for overlaying frozen earth. Ahead on the jeep trail, the sun bounced off a wet mat of dead leaves and snow melt. In the cutover field of scrubby trees, the immature trees let in the strong sunlight, but today you could believe it was the force of the sun that blasted the field and stunted the trees.

The sun was merely making a feint toward another season. For someone like me, with my vague grasp of the calculus behind the duration of winter, it seems on a day like this that the sun can do anything, that it can hold back and keep winter here, or pour down and make winter spring.

Sunset, Thursday, 7 January 2010

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

A few snow showers along the Blue Ridge at sunset.

Earlier I pulled up to an intersection and beyond the red light thought I saw a pink flush over the haze horizon. Colors of coral and starfish, I decided. Long thin white clouds were foam. The blue sky between them turned out to be just that – blue sky. I was surprised to realize everything around me on the ground was the ocean and I was looking up through its surface.

Sunset, Wednesday, 6 January 2010

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

The big blue-green copper dome extends beyond blue snow mountains, past amethyst clouds, above carved oaks of gray-brown agate, over fields of broken green and white marble, over our house of sugar and salt, and my slate painted with powders of iron and zinc, glazed with ice. Crystalline evening.

Pairs

Painted lines on a vast parking lot, clouds in the blue sky. Dirt on heaps of snow along the road, streaks of gray in the white clouds. Flashing light of the rescue squad coming to someone’s aid, the red sunrise. The snowy blue-gray Southwest Mountains stretched out in a wave pattern, blue-gray-white clouds stretching behind the Southwest Mountains in a wave pattern. I don’t know where metaphor ends and reality begins.

Sunset, Tuesday, 29 December 2009

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

There’s a winter landscape right between a freeze and a thaw, and you may interpret it differently depending on which direction it’s taking. Some ground shows, in places even almost dry, there’s a beaten-back green inside the dead-straw matted grass – while entire fields remain solidly white. The sky approaching sunset doesn’t tip off any colors or show any clouds. We might have a solemn sinking of the sun and a falling thermometer, and no reassuring music to go along with it. Then at the last minute, even though it is indeed turning cold, we hear a little tune for a winter sunset.