Sunset, Thursday, 20 August 2009

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

This is only about the third hour of my life as an ophthalmology guinea pig, taking advantage of my natural tendency toward ‘monovision’ by wearing a lens in one eye and nothing in the other ... and this is the first painting I’ve ever done this way.

So if it looks to you that I’m doing weirdly elongated stuff like El Greco or painting like the nearly blind Monet, just let me know ... and I’ll be sure to stay with the prescription.

Sunset, Wednesday, 19 August 2009

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

In the vast museum gallery of the woods, walking with Flint, the sun through cloud cover skylight, I see art in reverse – Courbets and Corots, Constables, Sisleys, Homers and Sargents before they became these things. They started here, somehow. Even the most visionary Cézannes, the O’Keeffes, Dalis, Kandinskys, Rothkos, Warhols, Hockneys: What a room ...

Flint stops to drink from a stream, in the museum cafeteria.

Sunset, Tuesday, 18 August 2009

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

Visit to the Dermatologist

I sit in the sterile exam room, it’s past 5 o’clock and the doctor’s running very late. I wonder if I can find anything to take me out of here.

Venetian blinds. Venice. Great! – never been before.

Waxed and polished floor of uncertain color – brown, beige, orange, sand, apricot, none of the above. Sun’s reflecting strangely off the surface of the Venetian Lagoon. Piloting cargo out of here for the doge.

Container for medical waste, marked with ‘BIOHAZARD’ and a scary-looking symbol. Is that the skull and crossbones I see?

Sink. Does that craft intend to try to sink me?

Stainless trash can. Ah, lads, we’ll give ’em a taste of our steel!

O.K., Bill, you’re not 10 years old anymore and you’re getting carried away with the military swashbuckling. But wait ...

Magazine (never mind that the title is ‘Golf’). Aye, mate, see to the powder in the magazine!

Enough already.

Arguably cheesy piece of art on the wall. Even though it depicts cavorting dolphins, I will refrain from using it to continue my sea battle. Well, cheese-making is in fact an art.

Nice gold frame around the cheesy art. I think I should paint portraits of everyone in my family and put them all in gold frames.

Better practice on myself first.

Thin wooden door. Young aspens high on a ridge above Cimarron, N.M. One place I have been.

Cold air blowing down through the ceiling vent. Jack London, “To Start a Fire.” Scariest story of my life as a boy.

Container for used needles on the wall. Lou Reed, “I’m Waiting for My Man.”

Jars of cotton balls. Brook Benton, “The Boll Weevil Song.”

Drop ceiling of acoustic tiles. What if tiles could be electric or acoustic? Think I’d like electric.

Dr. Lockman comes in, examines me, says, “You’re so on target it isn’t funny.”

Of course. Just ask the pirates.

Sunset, Monday, 17 August 2009

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

I heard tonight from a visitor to this site from Slovakia. Despite my father’s Dutch name, from van Doorn, from ancestors who started farming in what is now Brooklyn in 1630, I’m half Slovak, as far as I know, through my mother, whose parents came here from Czechoslovakia more than 250 years later.

I sketched a rock in the dirt road, about a quarter mile to the right of this vantage point; I sketched the sun in clouds at about six o’clock from the same place. It’s one those scratchy-hot uncomfortable dog days, of which we’ve actually had few this year. (I perhaps should note that we don’t have A/C.) I wanted to think of the clouds as cool blue rock and not boiling gray steam; I wondered how much the rock, the clouds, the sun and I might have in common – and other thoughts of a mild delirium.

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.