Sunset, Thursday, 24 September 2009

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

It’s been steamy today, and my attention turns, down in front of my view of the sunset, to the huge circular garden in the back yard, which, as I’ve previously explained, has been neglected and left dormant this year – which actually means, going crazy with weeds this year. But not just your ordinary waist- and shoulder-high weeds – I mean jungle-like weeds – violacious weeds. (I love that word – encountered while proofing a medical journal, where it described a skin eruption. Scared me to death.) Pokeweed, of course – spectacular, almost tree-like pokeweed some nine feet tall, now a gorgeous toxic bright purple from stern to stems, hanging with the dark purple berries we painted our faces with as kids. Thistles. Yet another volunteer peach tree. New blackberry hedges. But the most prominent invader – literally an invasive species – ailanthus trees, three of them, at least 15 feet high. How something so widely despised would be called Tree of Heaven escapes me; around here it’s commonly known as Paradise Tree.

The southeast Asian origins of the ailanthus suit the day, and its jungle leaves make me think of the paintings of Henri Rousseau – yes, the one they called ‘Le Douanier’. What a beautiful painter. Alongside my setting sun (although mine is overtaken by nearby storms), Henri adds a lustrous silver moon. At the center of the garden, perhaps a savage nude with lionesses. The garden chokes with tropical vegetation. The Blue Ridge reverts to its ancient volcanic past and issues plumes of smoke.

Sunset, Sunday, 16 August 2009

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

Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time.

– Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

I’m glad it took me a little too long to mix my palette, because by the time I did, everything changed – at which point, of course, I had to mix my palette ...

What I had been fixing to say, yesterday, about Bradford Angier and his wonderful book Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants – before I found out he was a more famous figure than I knew and that he had apparently swiped material from another of my favorites, Stewart Edward White – had to do with wild black cherries. So I think I’d better get back to them. They’re not as confusing.

For years I’d deprived myself of these because I assumed they were just chokecherries. Big mistake. In that period in August – very much like this period in August – when you’re out in the woods and wish you could find a few more blackberries, but they’re gone – black cherries are a small but refreshing consolation. Or consoling refreshment.

In some ways I’m a poor observer of the woods. I don’t know how many long-dead “red oaks” I cut for firewood before I realized they were ... the very same wild black cherry. They can grow as tall and as stout as oaks – that’s about my only excuse. They don’t burn with quite the same strong heat or make the same sort of coals, but their effect is very pleasant and fragrant. And sometimes it’s actually better to have a more moderate heat, as country folk who avoid black locust will attest.

Anyway, I had trouble finding wild black cherries in Angier, because he calls them ‘rum cherry’. The line that caught my attention:

Deer mice and chipmunks deem the pits a favorite repast, the latter storing them in quantity for the periods during which they rouse and eat in wintertime.

Putting aside the charming idea that mice and chipmunks would ‘deem’ cherry pits a top choice, my hat’s off to anyone who could have observed chipmunks as they ‘rouse and eat in wintertime’. And, if by chance Mr. Angier did not observe them directly – if perhaps he was making stuff up even as he was cribbing from my man Stewart White – I think he would still deserve kudos for the expression. I can see those chipmunks and in my mind they resemble happy peasants in a feast by Brueghel.

Coal and the Power Lines

The ominous, vaguely bituminous look of last night’s sky inspires me to add this as a note here.

Today I was happy to find, up in the branches of a black cherry tree, a few wild blackberries ready to eat, along with just-ripened black cherries. It reminded me of one of the most frequently asked questions in American life: “Would you like to try our combo today?” Finally, I was able to say yes.

But the scarcity of blackberries around here, which I have previously attributed chiefly to the land-clearing activities of crews under contract to Rappahannock Electric, also reminded me that I had just received a most unfortunate mailing from that utility.

REC urged me to call my Senators and urge them to oppose the climate change bill already passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill, REC warned, might make electricity more expensive.

Well, I guess so! Any time you can’t just burn any old cheap dirty coal you want to, anywhere you want, something’s gotta give. (On the subject of coal and climate change, this article from The New Yorker is worth registering in order to read, and I believe this blog item doesn’t require signing in.)

As a customer-member (incredibly tiny minority shareholder) of the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, I was not happy to see my money being spent in this lobbying effort. If electricity’s going to become more expensive, let’s not waste funds now on futile efforts aimed at halting human progress.

And despite the importance of coal to the economy, I thought I would register my dissent partly in the name of my grandfather, a Czechoslovakian immigrant who was a coal miner in Pennsylvania. I think working in the mines was probably not the primary cause of his very unpleasant death from throat cancer, but I doubt that it helped. I’d like to think that Grandfather Bezilla would be on my side of the climate change issue today.

After the blackberries and cherries, I saw something on my walk that made me feel a little better about this year’s aggressive land-clearing. Along the track we call the Power Line Road, growing out of the Nagasaki-like devastation, two bright green paulownia trees were shooting up like rockets – already some eight feet high, with enormous healthy leaves as big as the ear of a young elephant. Despite their rapid rate of growth, these paulownias could not come close to endangering the lines if they grew another 150 years. That may not save them when the crews come through again, but in the meantime – and regardless of how botanists may feel about them as an exotic species – their beautiful attempt to flourish is the best revenge.

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.

Looking at the Sunset (Part 6)

What I’ve been working up to in this series of posts on ‘Looking at the Sunset’ is two-fold. The immediate purpose and impulse is just to talk about how my view of the sunset – literally the view, what you can see from here – has changed in the more than 14 years since I started. But I find I can’t really describe that without getting into how this began and where it’s going.

I didn’t much notice or care about sunsets and sunrises until not long before I began this series in 1995. It had never occurred to me to paint one, and I’d been painting for more than 25 years. And this is despite the fact that, in Batesville, Virginia, at a place called Port-a-Ferry Farm, the tiny ‘country villa’ I rented for seven years until 1990 had a truly spectacular western view of the Blue Ridge.

But by mid-1993, I was coming to the end of a relatively dark couple of years – sort of like waking up from a long low-grade nightmare. Part of the waking up was sitting outside and watching the sun go down. This was at a house I rented on a farm just four miles from where I’m living now, in the Stony Point area of Albemarle; the rickety narrow side deck offered a great view of the sunset.

Then I moved to Glendale, off Scuffletown Road in Orange County – another rental, but a 400-acre farm where my nearest neighbors were one mile in any direction. (Have I mentioned being a bit of a recluse?) Believe it or not, this was the view from my front door:

Glendale, 1995. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48.

However, that view was to the east, and even though there were some beautiful sunrises, my state of mind early in the morning tended to be more one of just trying to wake up than of reveling in the wonders of the world. To the west, in back of the house, a large wooded hill reared up and blocked out the sunset. To my surprise, I found this kind of irritating – I hadn’t reckoned on not seeing sunsets or on caring whether or not I did. I even went to the trouble a few times of climbing the hill to see what I could see, but couldn’t see much.

After one year, in May 1995, Glendale had been ‘sold out from under me’ – as we powerless renters like to say. I found the place where I’m living now, back again in Stony Point, in Albemarle County. (I met Laura six months later and we’ve been living here since we married in June 1997. Our nearest neighbor is much closer than mine were at Glendale; but then, this is the only house on more than 1,000 acres.)

One of the first things I noticed, just after moving in, was the sunset from the back yard. The sun went down behind wall-to-wall Blue Ridge – big sky, big earth. Soon I started thinking I should just go out and paint the sunset.

Part of the motivation – the part that didn’t come simply from the view itself – was that I was only an occasional painter – or better put, as they say in baseball, a streaky one – and strangely slow and deliberate. I would start out fast, and in those initial hours seem to come very close to something exciting and finished, then settle into months of elaboration – glazings and subtle revisions – which might work out very well, yet the result would not have quite the same energy I’d started with. I was like a general who carries the field right up to the adversary’s HQ, but then stops and digs trenches. Given that situation, the sunset seemed like a way almost to trick myself into painting more often and painting more freely and quickly.

In a sense, I started painting the sunset because, here, I could see it – ‘because it was there.’ I think the part of my impulse that I tend to discount is how my relationship with this fundamental daily fact of life had already affected me. That’s an aspect of the series that I’m still uncovering.

On top of the simple decision to paint sunsets there’s the further question of painting them every single day, which I didn’t start doing til September 1997. When I was painting my first sunsets, in June 1995, a visitor suggested perhaps doing them every day. It sounded crazy – or actually not so much crazy as scary, because of the commitment involved – but I didn’t want to mention that I’d already thought of that. I just didn’t quite have the nerve to start, or maybe I didn’t yet see the sense in it – or sense the sense in it, because the sense is difficult to see outright.

So, back in 1995, the sunset here was pretty plain to see; after all, that’s what prompted me to start. The sweep of the old view is suggested by this very small painting of the sunset of June 21st, 1996, less than 24 hours after the summer solstice:

Sunset, 21 June 1996. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 4 x 6.

What’s funny to me is how much the view of the sunset here has changed, how difficult that sometimes makes things – and, in the end, how little it may matter.

I’ve alluded to this change in the view in my posts about the volunteer peach tree and my sketch of the back yard. Since 1995, all sorts of trees and bushes have sprung up along the back: the volunteer peach, a box elder that’s growing a mile a minute, a ‘tree of paradise’ (ailanthus) just behind it that seems to be growing even faster, a volunteer peach tree that isn’t a peach tree just to the left of the box elder (its fruit are more like nectarines but I’m not sure, and they’re exuberantly exuding clear sap), and a sour cherry (aka pie cherry) just in front and to the left of that. These are in addition to the big red oak in the right corner of the yard, a big white oak in the field behind that, a tall dark cedar in the field in the middle of the view, and a truly enormous venerable white oak to the left of the cedar.

(Sorry to go on in so much detail about the contents of our back yard – but I’ve spared you the really picky little details!)

In any case, that trees grow is hardly surprising. What I never thought about, and wasn’t prepared for, was how “the woods” in aggregate get so much taller in what seems like such a short time.

Here’s a funky little schematic of the current view:

Pencil on paper, 5.25 x 8.75.

(The “garden in ruins” – a big circular space that normally would have at least 30 heirloom tomato plants plus basil, Italian parsley, beans, okra, Florence fennel, cucumbers, sweet peppers, etc. – is a testament to the time demands of blogging and, perhaps even more, to the psychic diversions of hoping any day to find a place we can buy and call our own.)

The kicker – the sockdolager in all of this (just had to use that weird crazy word, which I’ve only ever seen once, in a manuscript by an old friend, Bill Crandall) – the most important factor in this changing view is the woods. 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?

Meanwhile, as for the growth of the mountains – not so much. In fact, I hear the Appalachians have been taking it on the chin for something like 60 million years.

The result, visually, is that I can’t see as much of what’s going on, or can’t see as easily, as I could at the beginning, resulting in the little dance I once described, in which I sometimes have to bob and weave to see the sun. I may have to stand on the back porch steps to confirm whether or not the mountains are even visible in clouds or haze, and it may require repairing to various upstairs ‘observatories’ to see clearly just where along the mountains the sun is setting.

Now – I really wonder why I needed to tell you any of this, except by way of a sort of personal diary, which is exactly the sort of blog I knew from the outset I did not want this to be. One reason is to indicate that these paintings are somewhat more stylized than they may appear; my purpose has never been, primarily, to record or transcribe.

But further: I believe that somehow these paintings may have more to do with sunset as an event than with sunset as a picture. I suspect a perfectly legitimate series could be done without seeing the sun set – as long as it corresponded in a meaningful way to the event. In the end, like anything else in any of the arts, work stands simply on how and what it communicates.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking through the gap between the peach and the box elder.

Update on Monday, July 6, 2009 at 02:49PM by BVD

A little more orientation. Here’s the house:

Laura Owen Sutherland

The perspective for the sunset paintings is usually from directly in back of the house. Sunrise paintings are done from just about where Laura is standing for this shot, looking in the opposite direction. That’s the morning sun in the window. The big red oaks on either side of the house aren’t even mentioned in my schematic, they’re behind me in that sketch. Plus there are three equally large oaks above us here, not in the photo. 

Funny thing is, when the old-timers who used to either live here or see their relatives here drop in to visit the old house – and this has happened four times – they always start out the same way: “What happened to all the big trees?” (!!?)

(A fine poem about one of those visits – you have to click on “The Visit” – can be found here.)

Aerial view:

In summer, looking at the sunset means looking almost toward the upper left corner of this picture – or, from my perspective on the ground, toward my right (toward the north). The amphitheater-like curve of the trees in most of my sunsets comes from the fact that the trees are closest on the left and right of the back field, and that field falls away steeply in the middle.

Sunset, Monday, 29 June 2009

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

Behind the cedar, the box elder, the paradise trees / trees of heaven, the peach and the sour cherry, the great red oaks and their wild grapevines and poison ivy, behind the fields of a dozen deer beyond the trees, behind the woods beyond the fields, woods of white pine and post oak, sassafras, dogwood, redbud and hickory, behind the rocky streams and ravines sunk down in the woods, behind the jeep trails and power lines and the highway and the small near mountain, behind the valleys before the blue ridged mountains, behind the ridge itself, the sun pulls all toward it, brings everything together into one tree, one field, one wood, one stream, one mountain, one great darkness, filled with light.