Sunset, Monday, 28 December 2009

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

I did a small painting for a friend today based on a Chinese ink painting from about 1750 – Willow and Peach Blossoms, by Li Shan. I thought about it later, while I was painting the sunset, because I’m sometimes uncertain whether this daily practice is really worthwhile. I realized how wonderful it might be if Li Shan had left a record of his observations of daily sunsets or sunrises in the 18th century.

Today is the eighth anniversary of the day we adopted Flint (the fabulous foxhound) from the Fluvanna County SPCA. Since I’ve mentioned him in a million posts and shown him only once, I thought I’d give him a little more air time. Here’s a formal profile of Flint watching something out the living room window:

Laura Owen Sutherland

Very recent:

Laura Owen Sutherland

And very typical:

L.O.S.

Sunset, Thursday, 3 December 2009

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

Sunset seemed to be happening on schedule, but I had one more woodcutting chore. Lucky for me, because things really started happening during the twilight portion of the program.

Yesterday and today tempted me with different ways to say early December feels a little out of focus. Shepherding Flint yesterday on a five-mile-or-so off-leash ‘walk’ (his part is more like a run, and longer), in the rain, I had foolishly just believed the forecast and wasn’t dressed for 39°, and the low dark clouds (and my numb hands and feet) belonged to midwinter. 

This afternoon I had the impression of the sky as a big watery blue bog of early spring.

But then the days aren’t out of focus except in these conceits. Early December shows us exactly what it is, and these are the days – the days we’re dealt.

Sunset, Friday, 20 November 2009

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

I’m happy the sun came back out for my brother Steve’s 60th birthday.

Rain, earth, sun. That’s more or less the theme from a long walk today, although those three elemental words immediately distracted me by making me think of writing about D.H. Lawrence. Another time. D.H. did loop back around to my brother, whose middle name is Lawrence, but I guarantee Steve wasn’t named for any author.

My college roommate recently wrote, “I was raised to consider myself part of an intellectual elite.” That just goes to show what an interesting culture gap we had to deal with in our early days at Hopkins. Steve and I et al. were raised to consider ourselves ... I have no idea!

Steve’s name was inspired by Steve Van Buren (Stephen W.), a pro football hero whose greatest fame came with the NFL championship games of 1948 and 1949. I don’t think Steve has ever given much consideration to the curious fact that he was named after a running back for the Philadelphia Eagles, of all things – not exactly a well-loved franchise in our experience.

Anyway, even though the Van Doren family, at least, had, in previous generations, a pretty strong tradition of preserving and passing names around, I suspect my parents were part of a (possible?) postwar trend toward naming your kid any damn thing you wanted. I’m the only one who got someone’s name – my grandfather’s – which was his grandfather’s, so break out the roman numerals. I think the story we always heard was that ‘Stephen Lawrence Van Doren’ sounded good.

Sounds very good to me.

Rain, earth, sun. But look, before I get there, I have to ask. My wonderful, many-marvel’d spouse, who is hardly ever wrong – as a consequence of which I now owe her exactly $8700 from all the bets I’ve lost with her – thinks that posts like this one – you know, the ones where it sounds like maybe I got only three hours of sleep and then walked seven miles, so that I go off on the slightest tangent through a lack of inhibitory frontal cortex function – anyway, that people might not like such long posts. What do you think? If you disagree with Laura I will be especially interested in hearing from you. There’s no money involved, unfortunately.

At the first stream we (Flint the foxhound and I) crossed today, I was struck by the effects of yesterday’s storms. The stream banks, where they’re normally a smooth, almost shiny sandy clay, had been beaten down into a flat, matte, finely stippled surface much like the beach after a long steady rain. The water of such a small stream, only yards from the source, is usually quick to rise and just as quick to fall, leaving a clear low current just as before – but today, 12 hours after the rain had ended, the water was still somewhat up and, I was surprised to see, slightly turgid. Dead leaves were pasted to the ground, the trunks of beeches, hollies and poplars looked scrubbed and a clearing sky seemed reflected in the field. 

The rain, in short, had washed the face of the earth. (And even though hundreds if not thousands must have written this before, it feels so accurate to my impression I don’t care.)

Thanks to the wash, we could see along the jeep trail that no hunters had come in today. This meant a lot less uncertainty about what was out there in the 1000+ acres, and less likelihood of “Cold Mountain moments.” That’s what I call creepy, spooky feelings like those the reader gets when Inman is up in the isolated deep mountains and you don’t know if the Home Guard is about to find him. In my case, they can come from not knowing where hunters are or not knowing what Flint may be barking at or chasing, off in the distance.

As for Charles Frazier’s intensely wrought creation – I don’t mean to quibble – it’s not every book that earns a place in one’s vocabulary – but I wouldn’t have minded holding it open to the rain and washing out just a little of the melodrama. In a sense I wanted fewer Cold Mountain moments in Cold Mountain. But that’s me. I’m also crazy enough to wonder, quite seriously, if entire novels might be constructed from rain, earth, sun.

Sunset, Friday, 13 November 2009

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

Out on the long walk today, the rains having let up but the breezes still blowing from the trailing remnants of the storm (The Monster Nor’Easter That Ate Hurricane Ida), the woods and fields weren’t too wet – you could walk through the overgrown fields of pine without getting soaked by the turnstiles of the lower boughs. On the jeep trail plastered with oak leaves, with the air beginning to turn a little milder, there was a strangely pleasant vista of almost nothing but fallen light brown leaves converging ahead with the light gray sky – duotone all the way (except the occasional scrubby evergreen in the margins of the woods made it more like a tritone). Because of all the rain and wind we’ve been having (it’s raining again, very close to sunset – this storm doesn’t know the word quit), something about this ordinarily very dull vision of brown and gray felt happy and bright. As Flint and I got down toward the Rivanna, we heard the railroad at the Preddy Creek crossing less than a mile downstream – a singular definite roar I took to mean an Amtrak passenger train, versus the bumpy and elongated rumble of a freight.

I’ve seen many admirable paintings of this kind of dim gray-brown late fall or winter scene, but something is missing in them generally. It’s true that in what I saw and heard, nowhere was there visual evidence of any bright color – a broad swath of brilliant red or a line of electric turquoise. Yet it was there – I saw it anyway. My advice is, don’t let November fool you.

Sunset, Wednesday, 11 November 2009

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

The walk today with Flint – five miles instead of the usual seven, because of the weather – was like walking between two sponges, one being wrung out, the other getting soaked.

I was hoping to have something for you, more or less for Veterans Day, about the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, and an oblique connection I have with its underlying story. It (the item) keeps changing. It’ll show up here as soon as my mind clears – or tomorrow’s sunset comes – or it stops raining ...

Sunset, Monday, 21 September 2009

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

I think I might be issuing my final report of the year about sumac, having opened this little can of mysteries in two posts, on July 29th and August 5th. As I have previously observed, sumac is quite the hot topic ... somewhere ... maybe. I actually did receive one note of appreciation from a reader who, while I guess she didn’t describe herself as an outright fan or aficionado of sumac, at least didn’t consider the subject to be beneath notice. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she didn’t seem to consider it beneath the standards of this blog.

Anyway, today on my walk with Flint, as we got down near the [Rivanna] river, in the so-called Scrubby Field, I realized that the ubiquitous sumac trees or bushes had gone through many of their changes for the coming autumn, including their leaves beginning to turn bright red. In the plants that had originally caught my attention – which turned out to be the females – with their flower clusters changing from small green dots to magenta buds emerging out of gold petals – the clusters had over the past several weeks turned a sort of violet raspberry, then a deep red grape, and now a dark rust red. In the middle of that sequence, the buds seemed plumped with life, with a vibrant slightly waxy sheen. They still retain some of that healthy shine.

Meanwhile, you might recall I was beginning to realize the fields were also filled with male plants, with clusters that looked generally similar to the others at first, except instead of fat furled buds these were rather simple yellow flowers, each with five gold stamens. At one point during August I couldn’t walk through the field without wading through shoulder-high braces of yellow sumac laden with buzzing bumblebees and honeybees, the bees stuck all golden underneath with pollen.

With the passing weeks it became clear that the male flowers were being pretty much devastated and laid low by the pollen harvest, while the female sumac clusters were attaining the height of their beauty. I really don’t want to give Camille Paglia any more reason to gloat, but the guy flowers were wasted – looking literally burnt down to dark nubs.

Now the male sumac trees have no flowers at all, and the female trees are showing the shaggy dark red clusters so familiar in autumn.

And since there’s an obvious male-female subtext to this story, I can’t resist mentioning one more thing. Weeks after I ‘discovered’ these (to me) exotic sumac phenomena down by the river, about three miles from the house, I found that the whole time we had both kinds of sumac right outside the entrance to our front yard, where I had passed them every day without noticing.

Which illustrates (perhaps) that Man (or man) will sometimes pay attention to things only when they’re found elsewhere, at a distance, and miss them if they’re right in front of him.

Hear, hear! (Here, here.)