Summer Side of Life – Sunset, Tuesday, 21 July 2015

William Van Doren, SUMMER SIDE OF LIFE. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on Arches watercolor block, 17 x 23.

Title from the Gordon Lightfoot song.

Meets the Eye (Sunset, Thursday, 9 September 2010)

William Van Doren, Meets the Eye (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

This particular sky lasted almost no time, and by twilight proved to have been based largely on smoke and mirrors, perhaps even literally for all I know. As I was taping the painting to the wall to shoot it, the sky’s evanescentness (I would say evanescence but it doesn’t feel right) went well with the arguably terribly underrated “Goodbye Baby” by Jack Scott and the arguably terribly overwrought (it depends on who you are when you encounter it) “The Last Time I Saw Her Face” by Gordon Lightfoot. Anyhow, the sky was gone quickly but it left its mark.

Sunset, Tuesday, 22 December 2009

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

Shipwrecked as I am on a thousand-acre island of snow, my car with the clutch I foolishly burned up now blocking the ‘driveway’ (quarter-mile dirt lane) and inaccessible in the snow to tow trucks, I walked several miles along the side of four-lane U.S. 29 to get to a store. Following my Boy Scout training, I walked facing the traffic, which was rushing just two feet or so to my right. Now and then I hopped up onto a plowed snowbank to give tractor-trailers the respect they so fully deserve. Only a few drivers stayed conspicuously at speed or on message and peppered me with plowed slush.

The scale of life is so different on foot.

U.S. 29 is pretty much an antipedestrian landscape. No sidewalks, of course. Usually if you see anyone along the road it’s the itinerant homeless. But I was one of the few, the proud, the marooned.

I took a cab home (a first in my years in Virginia) – I really didn’t want to be the husband who incinerated the clutch one day and then, impaired by four shopping bags, got plowed into a snowbank by an oncoming SUV the next. More precisely, I had the cab take me to a dropoff point where I met Laura and we only had to carry the bags about a mile, through the fields.

(Critics/observers of this site will have noted that I thought the problem with the clutch last night was ice, but it turned out to be fire. You know how that poem ends.)

The ride back in the taxi gave me a further chance to reflect on this difference in perspective between being stuck here on the ground, as G. Lightfoot wrote, or zipping along in a vehicle. On my right, in the east above the Southwest Mountains, the sky at the horizon was a rare and perhaps indescribable blue that you almost never see except opposite the sun. It’s a sky that seems more illusory than distant – like robin’s egg blue, except not as brilliant and more delicately transparent. In the blue were a few vague shards of gray, their indistinct outlines adding to the impression of something not quite really there.

It struck me how an arresting moment like that would be much the same for a person standing in a field, traveling in a car, taking a train, or looking up out of the kitchen window. It’s a stillpoint. The still image is the hub of the wheel.

Sunset, Wednesday, 20 May 2009

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

Tonight’s big ‘empty’ sunset with ‘nothing’ in it – the kind of sunset no one would or should or does paint – reminded me, later, that “time has no beginnings and history has no bounds.”

I have this on no less an authority than Gordon Lightfoot in “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” I’m not a folkie – the next thing out of my iChing was “My Brain Is Hangin’ Upside Down [Bonzo Goes to Bitburg]” – but that GL item is one of the most thrillingly boundary-bending songs ever written. (Get the less orchestrated studio version, 6:22, if you can’t obtain the live track.) The boundaries I mean trace territories of music, lyrics, history and commentary.

Today I called Flint the foxhound a scoundrel. Then thought better of it. He’s a houndrel.