Sunset, Sunday, 3 May 2009

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

Raining tonight, and the “cracked bells and washed-out horns” of a wet northeast wind (just across my right shoulder, in this view) made me wonder how I might handle the painting – or, to continue with the song, what the silver saxophones might say to do. 

The rose tone behind, or within, the rain is something I first picked up from Childe Hassam’s “Late Afternoon, Winter, New York, 1900” – a famous painting of a snowstorm that I saw in a book I was given in 1972 (I still have the book).

My response to a sky of apparently nothing but gray is much different now than it was the first time I encountered it in this series, on June 28th, 1995, a painting I’ve posted, not for its own merits, which are very few, but as a point of departure. After that painting I began to realize that the series really emerges most on nights of a “non-sunset” sky. 

That 1995 painting, by the way, came after days of rain, and one day after the great Rapidan flood, which you can read about in rather technical but awe-inspiring detail here and here.