100° X 100°. Sunset, Saturday, 24 July 2010

William Van Doren. Sunset from Taneytown Pike & New Windsor Road, Westminster, Md. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

An approximately 100-degree view of the sunset on an extremely hot day.

The Air Condition

On a trip to Westminster, Md., for a family event, so the sunsets – tonight’s very interesting one from here and tomorrow’s probably from somewhere between Mt. Airy, Md., and Culpeper, Va. – won’t be posted until Monday. Art stuff, bulky and messy as it is, is still not too challenging to carry around; it’s the photo setup that’s the deal-breaker.

Anyway – meanwhile – as temperatures both here and at home have been stuck around 100 to 103 for several hours now, I’ve been thinking about air conditioning.

The New York Times today has a short item about living without air conditioning, and some of the effects of AC culture, that I found interesting, especially since I spend most of my time in a non–air conditioned rented farmhouse. But I’m now in a fully chilled room in a nice motel. I arrived via a four-hour drive that was easily the hottest I’ve ever experienced, and that includes the mid-July Mojave and Anza-Borrego deserts. (The car has “problem AC,” so we didn’t use it.) Brutal. The room, though basic, was a luxurious relief. I cooled off. I took a nap. Then ... I took a short walk to a store. Brutal again. The cold and the hot, back and forth, are each equally disorienting.

Shuttling between the two states seems to create something like a zone of non-being, in which it can be difficult to know or feel just where you are, how you are, perhaps even who you are. So what I’m thinking about today is not so much air conditioning itself. It’s the strange discontinuity between air conditioned and non–air conditioned life. Perhaps the discontinuity is striking only when it’s this hot. But then, as I was walking across parking lots to the store, I realized: It could be hotter.

Well, yeah. It could be even hotter.

Sunset, Sunday, 7 March 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Brightwood, Culpeper County, Va. Oil on linen, 16 x 20.

This was the third version of Sunday’s sunset that I sketched and more or less completely ‘got’ while we were on the road home from Westminster, Maryland, via Frederick and Leesburg. Ultimately I felt I had to get the “pink ray” that shot up on the left.

Sunset, Saturday, 9 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Westminster, Carroll County, Md. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

My view was from the top of a hill near the famed, fun and funky Baugher’s Family Restaurant, just down to the left or south, and, on another hill, facing this one from the left, McDaniel College.

To sit and write under a hotel room blanket is one way to have visions. This particular one was an ocean I’ve never seen.

It’s warm and blue, possibly the Indian. It’s vertical rather than the more familiar horizontal – portrait, not landscape (or seascape). So everything moves from below your feet above your head, even air, inside the water, to breathe. You’re walking, looking into the ocean, and you’re in it. What makes this ocean so special is it’s a completely landlocked concept.

Sunset, Saturday, 30 May 2009

Westminster, Md. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.This is a suburban sunset – the view is from my brother Steve’s front yard in Westminster, Maryland. But just a mile or so behind me is the pretty little nineteenth century commercial-industrial town itself. What occurred to me about Westminster, after writing about the Confederate sympathies of Baltimore, is that it’s one of the first towns on this side of Maryland, going north, where Johnny Reb might have had to watch his back when dealing with civilians. For me, it more or less marks an entryway into a northern, Union, Yankee feeling. My brother is basically a Southerner and his wife Sandy most definitely is one, but I’m not talking so much about who might be living here now as about a history that you can feel and even see in the old brick buildings. A Barbara Fritchie could just as easily have waved Old Glory from a balcony in Westminster as in Frederick.