Looking at the Sunset (Part 5)

Pencil on paper, 9 x 12.

A very hasty and, I thought at the time, unsuccessful sketch from an evening in  early June, 2009. Thought I didn’t like it, forgot about it, then found it and discovered I liked it quite a bit. I say a little more about it in my “twilight” post for 27 June 2009. This is a link in a chain of sketches working toward a description of what it’s like to paint here and how the series started.

The ‘question mark’ was for a tree I couldn’t identify until a very nice talk I had with a fellow election official on June 9th – the only G.O.P. rep who didn’t jump into the bash-fest. More about that when I get a chance, because the conversation I had with him about trees had a strong effect on all of us that day.

Sunset, Saturday, 27 June 2009

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

I don’t need this picture to be worth a thousand words, maybe just 200 or so, since I don’t have many word-words tonight, just these color-words.

I waited past ‘sunset’ to get this sky, and then, as sometimes happens, the sky went completely berserk with color. I sketched that one and may give it a shot tomorrow.

Speaking of second versions, I had actually done, in quick succession, two versions of the solstice sunset from June 21st. I’ve parked the alternate June 21st sunset at the end of the June calendar in the archive.

Sunset, Friday, 26 June 2009

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

Today, the first ripe wild blackberry – and only one. A bit late.

I might have expected the first one I found to be a dewberry – a variant that grows close to the ground, with fruits a bit rounder and sweeter and slightly less complex-tasting – but in fact it was a straight-up non-garden-variety regular old blackberry. More in weeks to come on a special type I started finding around here a few years ago (special to me – may be old news to others) and on the makings of wild blackberry tart.

This was also the first time this year I’ve had to wield a long branch in front of me on the walk with Flint to intercept spider webs across the jeep trail and in the woods. (Also a bit late for this, I’m happier to say.) I don’t mind spiders in general, but getting fouled in an entire web, with spiders or their suspended meals falling down one’s neck, ain’t much fun.

Carrying the branch in front, I sometimes feel like I’m carrying a dowsing rod. A funny discovery I made last year was that if I carried the stick before me with my right hand, I felt out of sorts, as if my vision and perception were divided – but if I hold it in my left hand, I hardly notice. At first I assumed it was because of a difference in the position of the stick in my field of vision. But that difference is so small, I now wonder if it isn’t something to do with having the ‘foreign object’ in my nondominant (left) hand rather than the dominant one. I don’t know the answer, but I bet Vilayanur S. Ramachandran does. (Link is to a fantastic New Yorker article on scientific inquiry but also on possibilities of the mind.)

Of course, it could have something to do with weird vision – monovision (nearsighted in one eye, farsighted in the other), poor depth perception – problems alleged to help some people paint, because they already see things flat like a 2-D composition. Sometime when I have nothing better to do than subject you to All The Fascinating Things About Bill, we’ll explore how and maybe why my eyes have changed color a few times – No! – Wait! – Don’t leave yet!

On June 18th and 19th, we somehow got into the French Revolution, more or less. The talk about Abel Gance’s 1927 film Napoléon made me think later about a film I’ve long been crazy about, The Scarlet Pimpernel, the 1934 version with Leslie Howard in the title role.

What I want to know is, how can it not be that Ray Davies was inspired by Mr. Howard’s performance (or maybe, but not as likely, the Baroness Orczy book) when in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” he wrote and sang:

They seek him here/ They seek him there/ In Regent Street/ And Leicester Square ...

Sink me ... Odd’s fish ... Begad and zooks ... I’ll be demmed but I believe the old boy is honor bound to confess!

Thunderhead in the South

Pencil and Prismacolor crayon in Moleskine notebook, 8 x 10.25.

This was another case, as happened in one of the entries from Baltimore’s Federal Hill in May, where I started sketching on a righthand page but had to annex the back of a previous sketch. Also another occasion where I needed to work quickly to avoid annoying Flint the foxhound, to maintain the delicate sense of collaboration that gives us some control over him when he’s running off leash.

This view is toward the Southwest Mountains. I’m happy to say that I violated at least one and perhaps as many as three of the precepts laid down by John Torreano in his aggravating, rather overweening book Drawing By Seeing. I thought the book might be good for my little art classes, but it took my 11-year-old student Willa Lin to show me that it was simply too doctrinaire. She dismissed the book out of hand in less than one minute!

Sunset, Thursday, 25 June 2009

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

I’m doing some homework on a local issue, but one that reverberates in many other places – here it’s the construction of the Meadowcreek Parkway in Charlottesville, and the fate of McIntire Park. Much of this is covered in an informative, energetic, lucid and confusing-as-hell website, savemcintire.com.

I wasn’t going to mention any of that today but I bumped into an old acquaintance and magazine interview subject this morning – he may not have remembered my name, we just smiled at each other – John D’earth – and then I saw John mentioned at the top of the McIntire site. Superstitious cat that I am, I took it as a sign. John is probably too young to appreciate my using this term, but if he isn’t the spiritual godfather of the Charlottesville music scene, then I don’t know who is. (More here.)

Development and transportation issues in Charlottesville are kind of funny. It’s a town filled with environmentalist liberals (if I lived there, I’d be one of them) but, for a small place, it has a really vicious urban heat island effect. I live only 10 miles out, but to drive down 29 into town in late spring, summer or fall is often to hit a wall of heat. Leaving, you cool down by very noticeable degrees.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s story about my walk and ”Pancho and Lefty” – which of course was a true accounting right up to the pistol shots – I wanted to share this little paragraph buried way down in the Wikipedia entry on Townes Van Zandt. As a preface, I might mention that Bob Dylan reportedly always had a very high regard for Van Zandt and the esteem was mutual.

Anyhow:

Van Zandt has been referred to as a cult musician and “a songwriter’s songwriter.” Musician Steve Earle, a close friend, once said Van Zandt was “the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” The quote was printed on a sticker featured on the packing of At My Window, much to Van Zandt’s displeasure. Van Zandt responded: “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken.”

Tonight I just want to be a fan and call this my Michael Jackson sunset.

Sunset, Wednesday, 24 June 2009

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

Out with Flint, it was a normal day. 

Oak leaves, green and glossy, stuck out everywhere into the trail, above last year’s layers of brown fallen leaves, some still whole, some broken down into recognizable pieces, then the litter, then blackish-brown dust, then oak dust turned to clouds. Many’s the highly decorated sunset I’ve seen with oak leaf cloud cluster. 

As usual, the ground and air refused to be entirely separated from each other.

As we crossed the section we call Middle Earth (so named because for years our trails encircled the large area of woods but Laura and I never actually went through), it was evident that trees supported the sky, or to put it another way, without the trees the sky would fall. 

In clumps of large ferns I saw fossils of the present forming by the instant. Soft deep cushions of moss grew faster than my understanding of moss.

I took the trees’ lower limbs, some with sharp broken ends and ready to fall, as a palpable warning not to make living woods into poetry or anything undead.

*    *    *    *

When we came out into the open the “Mexican guys” the landlord uses to cut the fields had just finished the last section and were taking a break at the edge of the woods. Flint ran up to them like he usually does with anyone in these situations and starting circling the tractors and barking like a maniac. I assured the guys he would follow me after a minute or two; they were both at one of the tractors, one sitting in the seat, the other standing as if on a sort of running board on the other side near the front.

“That’s O.K.! It’s O.K.!” they said.

I kept walking and, thankfully, Flint did stop and followed me in short order. I waved and without looking back yelled out “Buenas tardes!” in my best casual, I’m-really-not-trying-too-hard effort at Spanish.

That’s when they shot me four times in the back with their pistolas.

In my anxiety to avoid stereotypes I had failed to notice the fully stocked bandoleers across the guys’ chests. Not to mention the sombreros, big mustaches, and menacing smiles with gold teeth.

My dying thought, if only I can get Townes Van Zandt to commemorate this ... could he be bothered to split the difference between Pancho and Lefty?