Sunset, Friday, 5 February 2010

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

With Ethel Cole’s “snowpocalypse” getting under way here about daybreak – there's now a Twitter feed with the snowpocalypse tag – and the Washington Post has come up with Snowmageddon – Laura and I took Flint on a run of around three miles. Here are a few shots (photos by Laura Owen Sutherland) ...

Sunset, Tuesday, 2 February 2010

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

Snowing at sunset (and for the past couple of hours), 33°.

Given what I have to report, it’s just as well that with snow blanking out the Blue Ridge, I’m featuring the woods in the foreground. I’ve written about these woods before, especially in the final entry on “Looking at the Sunset,” concerning how they’ve come to affect the view. I said I’d been surprised by how much the woods, as an aggregate, had grown in the 15 years I’d been painting the sunset beyond them, and I basically implied, in so many words, that I must’ve been kinda dumb not to realize that they would.

What I said, exactly, was

I guess I always just thought the woods were what they were – the woods, mature, pretty much unchanging. But “the woods” must be jumping up quite a bit every year. Who knew? 

But now comes word, in yesterday’s New York Times, that woods in the eastern U.S. have been responding to climate change by growing two to four times faster than normal. Although they apparently can’t keep this up indefinitely, for now they’re consuming some of the excess carbon dioxide. However much snow we may be getting in this brief season, and regardless of what the groundhog may have to say, it seems appropriate to welcome you to the greenhouse.

Sunset, Sunday, 24 January 2010

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

Rain showers and very dark at sunset.

Earlier, from inside the woods: The sky cleared, just a while, in the south and east away from the sun. There’s a blue peculiar to this kind of moment – radiant but distant and not quite real, as if waiting in some other realm to be introduced into the world – as if ‘blue’ has just been invented. Obviously I don’t really know what adjectives describe it. Blurred roses of white cloud floated up in it, remnants of rain.

In the woods, the only leaves remaining against the sky were beech, leaves that hang on til March, pale brown to nearly white, curled dry. I didn’t want to dig out pen and paper (my usual portable note pad – a check carbon folded up in my back jeans pocket). So I kept walking and wrote in new blue ink on old beech paper.

Update on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 04:36PM by BVD

This image is available as a fine art print, here.

Sunset, Wednesday, 20 January 2010

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

A cold rain at sunset.

The so-called Alley Field is a sloping area of some four or five acres of grass with a narrow lane at its entrance; the alley runs from a broken metal gate next to a small tangled dell of honey locust, blackberry and wild rose, then opens into the field.

Along one border, over the past couple of years, big oaks have been falling into the field – first one in a windstorm, then one after heavy rains, and another – and then yesterday I found a 60- to 70-foot red oak had simply heaved up out of its roots and crashed out onto the grass like a building in the street.

What’s funny – sort of – about these trees is that all of them have been very much alive. On yesterday’s oak I couldn’t even find the typical one big dead branch anywhere, and all the twigs were in bud and flexible. Yet a huge oak on the very same fenceline, a neighbor to all these collapsers, bleached dead for decades, which I’d cut 95% of the way through and then tried to help along to its fate by driving seven big iron wedges into the cut, refuses to fall, or budge, or even teeter just a little for me. No felling, no firewood. Kind of embarrassing.

Turns out the tree has a structure well known to timberers – and it’s the reason I originally didn’t just go ahead and cut through the remaining 5% of the trunk. It has two major upper portions of canopy, two massive uplifted limbs, almost perfectly balanced. So you can have no idea which way it’ll break – for example, on you.

Dangerous types of trees earn names from wood-cutters. A tree hung up on another is called a Widowmaker – a name that has effectively deterred me every time I’ve been tempted to mess with one. This other type of tree – the equally divided one – is called a Schoolmarm. Can’t make up its mind. Do you think these lumberjacks might have been just a little bit sexist?

Sunset, Thursday, 24 December 2009

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

On the way, finally, to cut a tree – way way too big for any normal living room, as I’m sure you would have observed in an instant –

(we are now improvising alternative arrangements for decorating our living room) – anyway, on this arduous one-mile fool’s errand (my fool’s errands are always arduous, it seems to be my style) – I took a break.

(The tree was found in a field doomed to be cleared and developed, a situation for another time, perhaps.)

I fell straight back in the snow, to look up at what seemed an endless polar blue. (A blue that paled considerably by sunset.) The considerable strains of our snowstorm-blocked preparations eased. What I saw was a fantastic blue that kept changing depths, behind the clean, slightly shaggy yet almost polished-looking pale brown top branches of big white oaks. For that moment, sky and trees were a Christmas card I gave myself.

Sunset, Monday, 23 November 2009

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

Today, in the rain, I caught myself looking appraisingly at certain long-dead trees hung up and leaning in the woods – trees that could be, at first glance, either a cedar or a pine. That’s because pine is almost always useless for burning in a wood stove, and cedar (in my opinion, not shared by everyone) is fantastic. It was kind of a silly exercise because this was a place where I can’t go wood-cutting, but I think it was a reflex left over from a winter fifteen years ago.

Back then I was renting a circa 1845 farmhouse off Scuffletown Road in Orange County, Virginia, more than a mile from my nearest neighbor, and heating almost exclusively with an old wood stove and wood I was cutting myself. Along one of the fencelines, for about a quarter-mile at the border between a big field and the woods, at least two dozen very large cedars had been blown down, or pushed over, years before, perhaps decades before. All had fallen back into the woods and were completely dry, bleached white-gray like huge wrecks of driftwood. The wood inside was deep red. Heartwood.

I ended up using every last one of the fallen trees, and they were just enough to get me through. For me this was a year of reflection and restoration, and the fragrant burning cedar seemed to ‘smudge’ not just my house but me. I marveled how it burned so cleanly, with almost no ash. This was the period immediately before I began the sunset paintings. Anything I do today I owe in part to the Cedars of Scuffletown.