Sunset, Saturday, 4 July 2009

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

A very cloudy, muted Fourth of July sky. I threw in some ‘fireworks’ clouds simply because I felt like it.

Sunset, Friday, 3 July 2009

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

These posts have been a little intense lately, so I could go for a change of pace. Perhaps something more on the order of a Facebook style of discourse – so –

Is it just me or has this been a great year for grapefruit?

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Today by way of recognizing the birthday of my late father-in-law, Sidney Everette Sutherland (1937–2002), I’d like to put in a word for the guy who wrote one of his favorite songs, “Joy To The World” (for Three Dog Night). There’s something about Hoyt Axton I always liked and I just think he and Mr. Sutherland would have gotten along very well, if only on the strength of the sentiments in that song. Mr. Sutherland’s parenting style is nicely suggested by the lines “Joy to the world/ All the boys and girls ... ”

In addition, any doubt you could possibly still have about the limits of Wikipedia can be erased by the third line of its piece on this song: “The words are nonsensical.”

Hoyt’s mother, Mae Axton, co-wrote Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” ... and another of Hoyt’s songs, “Greenback Dollar” (Kingston Trio), is a folk song with virtually a rock beat, and easy to play, so in the 1960s it rescued countless high school hootenannies just on the strength of pure energy.

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Ragged clouds seemed cold and threatening but in places overhead actually as thin as smoke – I could see blue behind them, dirty orange light inside. Fake bad weather – gray containment of light, a cold diffusion of light with the effect of making everything on the ground seem solid, sculptural, clear, super-real. Today I would have had no trouble mapping the position on the ground of everything between here and the woods. Massive trunks of nearby red oaks could have served as horizons in themselves.

Sunset, Thursday, 2 July 2009

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

They Told Me Not To Do This

Ronald Reagan, through all his burgeoning MBA programs, told me not to do it. (I know – I taught in one.)

The future Fed chairman, showing me pictures on his New York office wall from his first position of power in Washington, in so many words very kindly told me not to do it.

My dear friend in the new Volvo said, as we were going over the Baldwin Hills, “What makes you think the world needs another ______ ?” I’ve forgotten the end of the sentence – it had to do with publishing The Wall Paper, about which he advised: Don’t.

My colleague going back to grad school after a few years of struggling in the workplace said, “Why waste your time?”

Howard was – is – emphatic.

Former girlfriends confided that their mothers had predicted better things for me. Or expected better things of me, I’m not sure which.

Suze Orman says – well, you can just imagine.

[Made that one up, of course.]

Advisors have sent me resumes of professional artists, to suggest the career path.

American Express commercials told me not to do it. They’re still telling me not to do it.

I must admit, even I have told myself, more than once, not to do it. In the very notebook in which I’m writing this, as I sit in the back yard five minutes before sunset, there is an entry that reads:

“Great Barrington, Mass., August 5, 2007. Sometimes painting the sunset every day seems completely idiotic. I mean, how could it not?”

In the end, the only thing telling me to do it, is it.

Sunset, Wednesday, 1 July 2009

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

It was a perfect summer day, then storms chilled everything down. The sky behind me, where the storms went, was half Creamsicle orange, half some deranged hydrangea blue – and if that sounds like a queasy mixed metaphor, it should. I might have taken a shot at it except not one but two cats were sleeping on (and wrinkling) the rolled-up cut linen I could have used for a second painting.

The most important thing I could possibly ever say about July 1st – with all respect to the great and (around these united states) highly underrated nation of Canada – is that it’s the wedding anniversary of Steve & Sandy Van Doren – 37 years today. Congratulations to the best people in the world, or at least my world.

I had some concern that people might take the following the wrong way and assume that the porcine reference could somehow be about them. I’ve taken an informal but devastatingly accurate poll ... and determined that my readers know better than that.

So, let’s ...

PLAY BALL!

I came to the ballpark
And discovered I was pitching
In a lightweight purple uniform
Before stands of black obsidian
I threw pearls across the plate
And every time the swine struck out
The million-dollar Mitsubishi scoreboard
Lit up with a picture of a roast pig with an apple in its mouth.

Sunset, Tuesday, 30 June 2009

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

There’s a light that shines, constantly, of which the sun is a part (for which the sun plays apart) and the moon is maid – a light that the light we see every day and night illuminates. To be a painter of light, I would think that’s the light to look for.

Sunset, Monday, 29 June 2009

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

Behind the cedar, the box elder, the paradise trees / trees of heaven, the peach and the sour cherry, the great red oaks and their wild grapevines and poison ivy, behind the fields of a dozen deer beyond the trees, behind the woods beyond the fields, woods of white pine and post oak, sassafras, dogwood, redbud and hickory, behind the rocky streams and ravines sunk down in the woods, behind the jeep trails and power lines and the highway and the small near mountain, behind the valleys before the blue ridged mountains, behind the ridge itself, the sun pulls all toward it, brings everything together into one tree, one field, one wood, one stream, one mountain, one great darkness, filled with light.