Sunset, Tuesday, 9 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.A long day at the polling place – around 15 hours, during which time you’re not permitted to leave the building. I hope to add a report here tomorrow; it seems that one good use for all that time spent waiting for voters to come in may have been finding a name for this site.

Creigh Deeds won the primary, probably a good outcome. I’ll be back with more.

Sunset, Monday, 8 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.Rain and lightning over the Blue Ridge, headed this way.

Tomorrow morning we get up at 4 to go work as county election officials in our precinct, for the Virginia Democratic primary ... and they don’t let us out until after the polls close at 7 and we’ve recorded the votes. Any registered voter can participate, but these primaries usually mean a very light turnout. So I’ll have some time, and depending on how much sleep I can get, may be able to write and sketch for tomorrow night ...

For all you pollsters whose calls I never picked up, at the moment I’m leaning heavily toward Creigh Deeds.

Update on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 05:10AM by BVD

I might add that that’s exactly the kind of thing I can’t say, breathe, or in any other way indicate, once I’m in the polling place. Something to be thankful for, seriously.

Sunset, Sunday, 7 June 2009

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

Thoreau: Factitious Cares & Finer Fruits

It amazes me how I can read something five or six times and still not understand, “Hey – wait a minute – that guy is talking about me.” So it has been with this line from Thoreau’s Walden:

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

Sometimes it’s just the language that keeps me from fully understanding what the author’s really saying – in this case, the ‘plucking’ of fruit just never did it for me. Funny, because I’ve spent portions of several evenings lately following the sunset while thinning fuzzy little peaches from the literally overbearing volunteer peach tree at the back of the back yard.

Plus, the reference to ‘coarse labors,’ by sounding like the farm labor of Thoreau’s day, screened me from the reality that he was talking about a wide range of activities. Today I think they might include quite a few things that we tell ourselves constitute leisure but that are actually forms of running in place. Certainly much of my ‘wasting time on the computer’ falls right into that category.

I believe that when I started going outside to paint the sunset, for me it was a little like going out to Walden Pond on the instalment plan – even if it was another twelve years before I read the book and began to see a connection. As Henry Miller said in his essay on Thoreau, Walden can be anywhere. The deep glacial pond for me has been inverted, in the sky.

Red Oak

Red Oak, 2009. Oil on watercolor block, 6 x 9.

Sunset, Saturday, 6 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.The sunset tonight is for a very private person we’ll call ‘Howard.’ Howard’s father, an American G.I., died at Omaha Beach 65 years ago today. Howard was born to the G.I.’s English bride just around two weeks later.

Howard, now a phenomenally successful American entrepreneur, has let me know he thinks painting the sunset every day is a terrific waste of time. But that, as the saying goes, ‘don’t confront me.’ That’s Howard being Howard.

And, I have to say, he’s hardly ever wrong about these things ...