Sunset, Saturday, 19 December 2009

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

About 20 inches of snow later, here we are. Interesting how the color of the snow changes in the depth of the storm, from all the fugitive tints I was talking about yesterday to a sort of deep silver.

Once again we had firewood chores, and I cut and then Laura and I carried wood through the drifts from a shed about 100 yards or so away. Before that, she took this shot of another of the landlord’s neglected sheds, near our front yard:

Laura Owen Sutherland

As we were going down to the other ‘barn’ to get the wood, we looked back at the house:

Laura Owen Sutherland

The strange glow – in the same direction as my sunset view – comes from the GE Fanuc facility about a mile away on Route 29.

Sunset, Friday, 18 December 2009

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

This is the beginning of what it appears will be the first major snowstorm in years for central Virginia east of the Blue Ridge. Big snows for Washington northward (and westward in the Shenandoah Valley) have just meant a mess of sleet and freezing rain here, making Charlottesville’s alleged average annual snowfall of around 18 inches seem like a cruel joke to us kids who want to get out of school. Seriously, over the last 10 years I’ve begun to think our winter climate was pretty much that of ... I don’t know ... northern Georgia.

After sunset I was in the middle of the woods, using the last moments of light to cut firewood where part of an oak had crashed down a few years ago. I was looking at the snow coming down through the trees and thinking about the color tones you can see behind snow. Sometimes it’s violet or lilac, sometimes a sort of cobalt blue, or even an orange or a red, and a background of trees can add a strangely warm umber.

A master at painting atmosphere of all kinds was Childe Hassam. I’ve mentioned before the impression that his “Late Afternoon, New York, Winter” made on me when I saw it at The Brooklyn Museum. It’s apparently on exhibit there now, on the fifth floor. Surprisingly, a shot of the painting at another site seems more accurate to the color I remember than the museum’s own photo. But snow is tricky, whether out in the weather or on a canvas; basically, you can see it as almost any color you like.

Sunset, Tuesday, 8 December 2009

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

I expect we all have missing or unfinished ‘works’, in whatever medium – painting, music, writing, home renovation, business, housework, cooking ... Hey, I just realized those weren’t just hypothetical examples, I qualify for all of them! Sad ...

Anyway, the Missing Works are usually the greatest, of course, since they live only in imagination and have never been made physically real. Today started with one: a painting of the sunrise. I also ‘saw’ two paintings of the mid-morning sky, but there was time only for the sunset, now that the clouds have come and we’re getting pelted with sleet.

The sunrise had a bright green sky close to the horizon on the right, or toward the south, just a bit of open sky above the low dark humped backs of the nearby Southwest Mountains. Toward the center and left clouds reaching up over the mountains were flame colors with slight ‘imperfections’ of dark, dull or whitish streaks that only made the colors seem more intense – burnished gold, golden rose, and a shade I’m not sure has a name but a gold-rose-magenta, all of which, in the painting, might have started as different combinations of Rose Madder Lake and Naples Yellow but then other colors would have needed to come in, brighter yellows, whites, crimsons, until the strange alchemy might be complete. And since this work is missing, I can assure you it was quite complete.

Above this horizon, higher clouds were veils of violet dust screening a sky of several interpenetrated blue pigments that, though still subdued and dark, burst out something like a deep drumbeat of the morning, just beginning. And since this is a missing work, I can assert that the sound could actually be heard in the painting.

Sunset, Monday, 7 December 2009

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

The blurred moon rising last night in haze and cloud could be the same gray light inside the woods today, and for that matter almost one and the same with the streaks of cloud and dim sunlight above yesterday’s sunset. The torn-up black track of the jeep trail in the woods was left by deer hunters but reminds me of my late friend Uncle Tony’s tales of escaping, as an Austro-Hungarian officer in World War I, from a prison camp, then making his way across eastern Russia to his home in Hungary – staying for a time with Russian peasant villagers and working alongside them looking for truffles and mushrooms in the rich soil of the vast woods.

(More about the amazing Uncle Tony – as he was known – soon. Anton Lipthay was his name – direct descendant, I believe, of the celebrated general of the same name from the Napoleonic Wars, although I didn’t know enough to inquire about this while he and his relatives here were still living.)

Rising moon, setting sun, diffusing daylight. Trucks, hunters, truffles, mushrooms, escaped aristocrats. The sound of clumps of wet icy snow falling all at once from pine branches off in the middle of the woods comes across as possibly also belonging to the Mercedes station wagon, a hunter’s, I had seen earlier in the field, if it’s leaving on the muddy power line trail, but I can’t tell. Different sounds and lights and times merge, converging on whatever comes next.

Sunset, Sunday, 6 December 2009

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

With some snow on the ground, it’s finally turned fairly cold; all three cats stretched out near the wood stove (our only heat source) all day – Flint the foxhound keeping a respectful distance on the sofa. Since this site has been mentioning firewood-cutting almost every other day, I thought I’d show some of the results. This was the scene in December 2005, but there’s a remarkably similar-looking pile out on the porch right now.

William Theodore Van Doren. India ink and watercolor, 2005, approx. 8 x 10.

The quote from Thoreau was added when we used this sketch as a Christmas card.

(Inside, the card read “Warmth, Love, Cheer – Now and for the New Year.” The sketch is available as a print or a card at a new Imagekind gallery.)

Wherever you are, I hope you keep warm.

Sunset, Saturday, 5 December 2009

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

Snowing since mid-morning, although with the air in the mid-30s, mostly just a heavy trace on the ground.

I was surprised by something in Proust, first just by the fact that he said it, and then by the strange way it struck me as relating to two seemingly very different things: internet and sunset (web and sun).

For, after all, my mind had to be a single thing; or perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theater, where, though every spectator sits in a separate place, there is only one stage.