William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20.
I wrote in my sketch that the sky above the clouds was ‘colorless’. In Virginia there’s a ‘colorless’ steam blue of summer and a ‘colorless’ steel blue of winter. Colorless colors, not radically different in composition, just in temperature. Tonight the clouds are largely cerulean blue, a pigment that, in keeping with the name, many people use for the heavens. In this case, heaven has collected in cloud, flying along with the sun.