Entries by BVD (3007)

Sunday
Jan032010

Sunset, Saturday, 2 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset at Woodbridge/Dale City, Prince William County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I watched both the sunset proper and then twilight, with a view of the low-lying land and the big-box stores. I chose twilight, without the big-box stores.

Sunday
Jan032010

Branches and Blossoms

William Theodore Van Doren. Branches and Blossoms. 2009, oil on wood panel, 11 x 14. Collection Hai Lin Family.

This painting on wood panel was inspired a Chinese brush painting from the 18th century, “Willow and Peach Blossoms” by Li Shan. 

Friday
Jan012010

Sunset, Friday, 1 January 2010

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

I’ve tried to describe, a few times now, how often I have to move all around the place here to really see the sunset, and then basically put together a composite of several views. Lately I ran into someone’s account of almost exactly the same process, and, quelle surprise, this guy Proust tells it pretty well.

Only his problem isn’t steadily growing woods in the foreground, he’s traveling by train, and at dawn he “glimpsed, in the windowpane, above a little black copse, serrated clouds of downy softness in a shade of immutable pink.”

“Soon,” he says, “great reserves of light built up behind [the pink]. They brightened further, spreading a blush across the sky; and I stared at it through the glass, straining to see it better, as the color of it seemed to be privy to the profoundest secrets of nature.”

Ah, but then the train changes directions –

and I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, till I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.

Thursday
Dec312009

Sunset, Thursday, 31 December 2009

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

Chilly and damp with low clouds and fog on New Year’s Eve. This completes five entire calendar years of sunset paintings – 1998, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 – along with the many sunsets from 1995–1997.

This bumpersticker, sole decoration on a late-model Honda Accord, outsmarted my resistance today with its modest and simple realism.

Something Wonderful is about to Happen.

Happy New Year!

Wednesday
Dec302009

Sunset, Wednesday, 30 December 2009

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

Wednesday
Dec302009

Pairs

Painted lines on a vast parking lot, clouds in the blue sky. Dirt on heaps of snow along the road, streaks of gray in the white clouds. Flashing light of the rescue squad coming to someone’s aid, the red sunrise. The snowy blue-gray Southwest Mountains stretched out in a wave pattern, blue-gray-white clouds stretching behind the Southwest Mountains in a wave pattern. I don’t know where metaphor ends and reality begins.