Did You Ever Go Clear? (Sunset, Monday, 7 November 2011)

William Theodore Van Doren, DID YOU EVER GO CLEAR? (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

So said Leonard Cohen. It rarely goes completely clear around here, and tonight was no exception.

I Am Not The Onion

Pakistan floods take out Osama bin Laden. U.S. claims responsibility via climate change.

The Air Condition

On a trip to Westminster, Md., for a family event, so the sunsets – tonight’s very interesting one from here and tomorrow’s probably from somewhere between Mt. Airy, Md., and Culpeper, Va. – won’t be posted until Monday. Art stuff, bulky and messy as it is, is still not too challenging to carry around; it’s the photo setup that’s the deal-breaker.

Anyway – meanwhile – as temperatures both here and at home have been stuck around 100 to 103 for several hours now, I’ve been thinking about air conditioning.

The New York Times today has a short item about living without air conditioning, and some of the effects of AC culture, that I found interesting, especially since I spend most of my time in a non–air conditioned rented farmhouse. But I’m now in a fully chilled room in a nice motel. I arrived via a four-hour drive that was easily the hottest I’ve ever experienced, and that includes the mid-July Mojave and Anza-Borrego deserts. (The car has “problem AC,” so we didn’t use it.) Brutal. The room, though basic, was a luxurious relief. I cooled off. I took a nap. Then ... I took a short walk to a store. Brutal again. The cold and the hot, back and forth, are each equally disorienting.

Shuttling between the two states seems to create something like a zone of non-being, in which it can be difficult to know or feel just where you are, how you are, perhaps even who you are. So what I’m thinking about today is not so much air conditioning itself. It’s the strange discontinuity between air conditioned and non–air conditioned life. Perhaps the discontinuity is striking only when it’s this hot. But then, as I was walking across parking lots to the store, I realized: It could be hotter.

Well, yeah. It could be even hotter.

The Woods Across the Field

The woods across the field got up this morning and decided they weren’t going to take it anymore – this greenhouse mess. Already growing faster than anyone expected they could, they doubled in height in the space of ten minutes. They doubled again. And again. I was here, on this side of the field, when the immense shade began. Soon the woods were interfering with volcanic ash. And it wasn’t long before they’d done what they set out to do. They’d reached the sun.

Sunset, Tuesday, 2 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20.

Snowing at sunset (and for the past couple of hours), 33°.

Given what I have to report, it’s just as well that with snow blanking out the Blue Ridge, I’m featuring the woods in the foreground. I’ve written about these woods before, especially in the final entry on “Looking at the Sunset,” concerning how they’ve come to affect the view. I said I’d been surprised by how much the woods, as an aggregate, had grown in the 15 years I’d been painting the sunset beyond them, and I basically implied, in so many words, that I must’ve been kinda dumb not to realize that they would.

What I said, exactly, was

I guess I always just thought the woods were what they were – the woods, mature, pretty much unchanging. But “the woods” must be jumping up quite a bit every year. Who knew? 

But now comes word, in yesterday’s New York Times, that woods in the eastern U.S. have been responding to climate change by growing two to four times faster than normal. Although they apparently can’t keep this up indefinitely, for now they’re consuming some of the excess carbon dioxide. However much snow we may be getting in this brief season, and regardless of what the groundhog may have to say, it seems appropriate to welcome you to the greenhouse.

Sunset, Friday, 18 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

This is the beginning of what it appears will be the first major snowstorm in years for central Virginia east of the Blue Ridge. Big snows for Washington northward (and westward in the Shenandoah Valley) have just meant a mess of sleet and freezing rain here, making Charlottesville’s alleged average annual snowfall of around 18 inches seem like a cruel joke to us kids who want to get out of school. Seriously, over the last 10 years I’ve begun to think our winter climate was pretty much that of ... I don’t know ... northern Georgia.

After sunset I was in the middle of the woods, using the last moments of light to cut firewood where part of an oak had crashed down a few years ago. I was looking at the snow coming down through the trees and thinking about the color tones you can see behind snow. Sometimes it’s violet or lilac, sometimes a sort of cobalt blue, or even an orange or a red, and a background of trees can add a strangely warm umber.

A master at painting atmosphere of all kinds was Childe Hassam. I’ve mentioned before the impression that his “Late Afternoon, New York, Winter” made on me when I saw it at The Brooklyn Museum. It’s apparently on exhibit there now, on the fifth floor. Surprisingly, a shot of the painting at another site seems more accurate to the color I remember than the museum’s own photo. But snow is tricky, whether out in the weather or on a canvas; basically, you can see it as almost any color you like.