Sunset, Tuesday, 2 March 2010

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

March has very nearly played lamb and lion on consecutive days. Today it was a wet snow through most of the afternoon. Not that cold but after about four miles with Flint the foxhound, my toes were numb for an hour. Even Piney Mountain, less than two miles away, elevation 1116 feet (and usually out of the picture frame to the right, or north, in the sunsets), was shrouded in cold snow fog.

When I look at some paintings I see colors oscillating, side to side, as if coming forward – as if light does not fade but there is a dimension in which it keeps gathering strength, and colors, even grays, reach unknown intensities.

Sunset, Wednesday, 17 February 2010

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

The air was cold, the fields still securely clamped in snow, and even the colors had something of a typical cold drained winter evening about them, but a few clouds looked suspiciously like banners of spring.

Sunset, Tuesday, 16 February 2010

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

Cutting wood (again! – one of the drawbacks of renting an uninsulated farmhouse) in the hour before sunset, I was watching an ever bigger and more golden sun drop through the clouds and thinking – oddly enough, for the first time – about the difference, if there is one, between painting space (a scene, a person, a thing) and painting time (like the sunset).

I looked away from the sun and noticed, down a narrow park-like draw that forms a stream and leads into the woods, that most of a cedar had been broken in two by the snows – one tall half of the canopy lay to the left of a shattered remaining ten feet of trunk, and the other side, just as tall, had fallen to the right.

The snow split the tree. The sun split day and night. And I still couldn’t articulate the difference, if there is one, between painting space and painting time.

Sunset, Monday, 15 February 2010

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

Snow here since noon, around an inch and a half of new snow, and it just started to lift at sunset. A momentary band of light or of brighter cloud in the west surprised me. After a day so enveloped in white and gray, the color of the light seemed about as exotic as the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.

Sunset, Wednesday, 10 February 2010

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

(Noon today:)

Flurry-clouds shred south away from the departing storm and shroud the sun in frozen steam, sharp crystals swirl off the snowfields and white out the twisted winds, the woods bend, straighten, and bend again, behind rising and falling veils – the earth is breathing ice, racing through time.

Sunset, Tuesday, 9 February 2010

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

Snow started an hour before sunset. I heard today from an artist in northern California, Lauren McMullen, who uses a formal method of meditation to still her ‘critical mind’. I don’t do that, but I know getting to that open or free state of mind is important. Among many things that work for me is watching the snow as it falls.