Sunset, Sunday, 30 August 2009

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

I forgot to mention that my Aunt Millie in Pittsburgh, on the morning of her 90th birthday, made cheddar biscuits, from scratch, for us to give to our dog, Flint. We can now report that Flint, the most discerning gourmand hound (‘It’s not a treat until I say it’s a treat’), has awarded Millie’s biscuits his highest rating.

Millie also gave us some tomatoes she’s grown this summer in her backyard garden, and she wanted us to take home a few Chambersburg [Pennsylvania] peaches.

She said, “Oh, every year we just can’t wait for those Chambersburg peaches, let me tell you, and they’re finally here!”

To be 90 and looking forward to this year’s Chambersburg peaches – I think that’s good.

Sunset, Saturday, 29 August 2009 / Notes from Pittsburgh, Part 3

William Theodore Van Doren. Neville Island, Pittsburgh, Pa. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

One of the best parts of our trip to Pittsburgh was going through the Andy Warhol Museum, where we spent about four solid hours. One of the best designed, most intelligently curated museums I’ve ever seen. Whether you love Warhol, or feel just lukewarm about him, or think you hate his stuff or just don’t get it – doesn’t matter, I think. Naturally this can’t be true for everyone, but I think almost anyone would come out of the museum enjoying and appreciating the man and his work.

It was a blast.

One thing I think I finally understood was how Warhol’s aesthetic could be at one and the same time absolutely rigorous and in a sense promiscuous. The peculiar unity of those elements made him a great image-monger and image-maker; for him mongering and creating became one thing. As much as he could create original personal imagery, and he could, he used that great natural talent to recognize and respond to the imagery of society, and so created not simply images but icons.

And there you have an aesthetically naive, backward writer sounding as if he’s just discovered something really new. But for me it was, so there you go.

Along similar lines, I’d love to rave about the beauty of Pittsburgh, and especially the bridges, but here again I think it’s been done many times before. Nevertheless, I’ll say it: I can hardly believe how beautiful the bridges are. And to have one named for Roberto Clemente (The Great One), next to another named for Andy Warhol, next to another named for Rachel Carson – all three of splendid design – is really almost too good.

Sunset, Friday, 28 August 2009 / Notes from Pittsburgh, Part 2

William Theodore Van Doren. Neville Island, Pittsburgh, Pa. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

We’ve been staying at a place in the Ohio River west of the city, Neville Island – named for a general in the Revolutionary War.

Neville Island, five miles long, is a wonderful landscape – maybe too wonderful, as I’ve tried four times to do some proper sketches but nothing has quite worked. That’s largely because the island’s wonders are industrial – big old factory buildings, steel fabrication sheds, railroad sidings, chemical tanks – complicated structures that always seem to take me time to master – to assimilate to the point where I feel I know what to do with them.

The same will be true for any painting I manage to do of the area around downtown Pittsburgh – perhaps my favorite skyline (after my sentimental favorite, Baltimore) – somehow even more concentrated and intensely articulated than Manhattan, and more fantastic, as in almost not real, like a magic fortress. We went up the Duquesne Incline, across the Ohio from the city, and I sketched from a vantage point almost as high as the tallest buildings. But it will take several more attempts plus Laura’s photographs to even begin to get my arms around Pittsburgh.

Back to Neville Island – once the “market basket of Pittsburgh,” it was in the process of being industrialized by World War I, when the world’s largest munitions factory was planned here. Even though the war ended before the plant was completed, the project opened the way for other major industries. In World War II the place was jumping – the Navy built 300 ships here, LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks), very large craft that could deliver 20 tanks and 160 combat troops. Then the decades after the war eventually left Neville Island a bit of an environmental shipwreck in the Ohio – a cleanup site of picturesquely falling-down or overgrown infrastructure.

The hotel where we’re staying, built last year, is a key part of the island’s comeback. I hesitated to inform my spouse that we were staying on an island with a significant amount of acreage considered “brownfields.” The beautiful big sports center and gym at the western tip of the island was built on reclaimed land once known as Poison Park.

A brownfield site is real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.

(Check out Western Pennsylvania Brownfields Center at Carnegie Mellon University.)

Now Neville Island holds a hodgepodge of industries on the two-thirds or so of the island immediately to our east, and a small, sleepy residential community just to our west, connected by an often empty four-lane street built some 70 years ago by the Navy. The island’s flat topography (despite high wooded ridges across the Ohio on either side) and the quiet neighborhood of bungalows and modest old houses contribute to an aura, on the west end, much like that of an old beach town about ten blocks in from the ocean. The industries to the east seem to include a few holdovers from the days of steel, chemicals and petro products, but also green businesses such as metals recyclers and other new concerns that probably need the major tax incentives offered here. I get the impression that at least some of these are startups that don’t mind if part of a factory’s roof may be missing or windows are blown out, as long as they can find some space that doesn’t leak.

As for me, I definitely don’t care if parts of the roof are missing and windows are gone. I wish Neville Island success in recovery, but won’t mind if it holds on to its broken-down past a little while longer.

Sunset, Thursday, 27 August 2009 / Notes from Pittsburgh, Part 1

William Theodore Van Doren. Plum, Pa. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Sunset for Thursday the 27th was seen from Plum, Pennsylvania, the home of my Aunt Millie and where, as it turned out, we celebrated her 90th birthday, at a very strange restaurant called John Anthony’s. Millie lives on her own in the same little house she and her late husband bought from his employer, the coal company, back in 1950 or 1951. They’d been living in Plum and he’d been working in the mine for a few years before that.

Plum, technically, or postally, is part of Pittsburgh but in fact is an outlying eastern suburb.

The Plum sunset over the John Anthony’s parking lot indeed came in a variety of soft plum colors – mostly hazy blue cloud with some suggestions of red-violet and gold. Plumes of plum-colored smoke. That’s more interesting than it actually looked, but – isn’t that the point of writing?

We’d had tons of traffic trouble getting across Pittsburgh to our hotel on Neville Island, part of it because of unhelpful directions from Mapquest, part of it because of the usual tie-ups where Pittsburgh’s traffic narrows to get through tunnels (made necessary by the city’s formidable ridges), but most of it thanks to insane paving projects that stopped traffic on major streets during the afternoon rush hour.

When we mentioned these to Millie, she said, “Oh, that’s because they want to get all the potholes fixed before the G20.”

This was the first we’d heard about the G20 being in Pittsburgh. As the Huffington Post explained, back in May:

For years, political leaders, community activists and ordinary residents tried to convince the world beyond its three rivers that this former industrial powerhouse was on the rise with an economy built on higher education, medicine and new technology.

From September 24 to 25, [Pittsburgh] will get a chance to prove its point to the world leaders representing 85 percent of the world’s economy. ... The White House announced that President Barack Obama decided to host the next Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh as a way of illustrating what success can look like.

When I came back to the hotel this morning from my coffee run, I reported to Laura:

“On radio, on TV, everywhere, this town is obsessed with just one thing.”

“Oh ... the G20?”

“No – football!”

Sunset, Wednesday, 26 August 2009

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

Off to Pittsburgh for about four days – it’s the 90th birthday tomorrow of my delightful aunt Millie, my mom’s sister and the only surviving sibling of either of my parents. You should be seeing three Pittsburgh sunsets, although they may not get posted until about Monday. Meanwhile, I’ll be leaving notes and sketches here as I can.

*      *      *      *

Walking through the woods into the fields today was strangely like going from thought to expression.

Inside the woods was all leaves and letters, details – dead trees on the ground, sentences here and there, ideas, fragments, pools of water on intermittent streams.

Step out into the open fields – boom! Under the wide blue sky, it’s a world of fully developed, finished thought – of books, films, musicals, essays, epic poems. The works. Fireworks.

On a lucky day you catch that transition, from the woods into the fields. Something you had been thinking becomes something you can say.

Twilight, Tuesday, 25 August 2009

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

One effect of the deepening twilight was to make the mountains a more radiant blue.