Sunset, Sunday, 8 November 2009

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

Driving home from Charlottesville today, on a perfect Indian Summer late afternoon (if you didn’t get the memo about Indian Summer, it was here), I was struck by the difference between the scale of what we can see, or notice, while we’re rushing between places or tasks or errands, and what we can actually spend time with and get to know. The cases in point were beautiful trees, one along High Street and another near the beginning of Hydraulic Road, of all places. In each case, although in different ways, there was the peculiar November picture of bare branches mixed with the remaining leaves – gold sunlit limbs reaching to the roadside, and scatterings of leaves still part green, part yellow or orange, part dry brown, in the slanted light. I felt the impulse to stop and really look at them, but as it was there wasn’t even time to tell if they were sycamores or oaks or maples or something else altogether. Driving down the road, or just going through a workday, can mean glimpsing dozens of possible paintings or stories but not being able to paint or tell any of them. Sunset and sunrise solve this problem, in the sense that they are both something to see and a period of time in which to see them – the visual and the temporal together. As I’ve tried to suggest elsewhere, they have as much to do with an appreciation of time as with any pictorial qualities. And, conveniently, they take up the entire sky – it’s very difficult to drive past the sunset.

Storyline

I am raving, hear me rave, as I recount a story of all stories, their essence. A story, ostensibly time, place, character, action, is in reality color. All about color. Story color comes before story line – this is a principle of aesthetics and a fact about action.

Blue moves me and I move in blue. Sometimes, a different matter entirely, I may wake up with the Blues. Or I wake up sunny yellow and go on into the green of noon. And when you greet me, you may be violet, red, crystalline white.

My own body – should we need a description of the protagonist – is a bay of moving color, steam clouds of pigmented feeling boiling a shape. You can say I’ve lost all sense, but it’s no wonder when you consider what I’m made of.

Sunset, Saturday, 10 October 2009

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

I’m happy to report that the October 1st sunset, as seen from the field at Scott Stadium at the University of Virginia shortly before MUSE took the stage to open for U2, has finally been posted.

Complex man-made structures, if I don’t have an opportunity to paint them live on the spot, can be tricky for me to deal with. When I’m painting directly from the scene, there’s little danger that I will plan or overthink – everything just happens. But if I carry away a detailed sketch and then try to reconstruct that scene, art can lose itself in an earnest attempt to RECONSTRUCT THAT SCENE. I painted that (October 1st) sky only when I was ready to treat the stadium the way I would anything else, leave out anything I cared to leave out, make it personal, simply deal with it naturally. Had I painted on the spot, I know I would have put in something for the tall narrow light standards, but working from a sketch this would have been architectural and deadly.

I did the sketch on the back of the top of a mini pizza box I ‘borrowed’ from a neighbor down in the General Admission standing area. (She’d finished her dinner.) Those little box lids make nice sketch surfaces – the flared sides create almost a shadowbox effect – mini pizza cartons, suitable for hanging.

Update on Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 08:13PM by BVD

Here’s the sketch for the 1st. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I’d left my sketchbook in the car ...

Flip It Over, It’s Domino’s! Inside dimensions approx. 7.5 x 7.25.

Sunset, Friday, 25 September 2009

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

All day it’s been gray here – damp and drab. As it became apparent it was going to stay that way, I started almost to obsess about rebelling against the overcast and perhaps painting ‘blue clouds’. I had ‘blue clouds’ on the brain as I surveyed the horizon one more time and started to paint.

But what one has in mind and what comes out of the brush – out of real impulse rather than a mere idea – are often two very different things. I didn’t really get the radically blue clouds I had pictured and in fact started, after a layer of white, with sepia – a brown – almost everywhere. And then a gray made mostly from ultramarine blue, yellow ochre and the Gamblin mixture called brown-pink. And so on – not so much blue and not a departure, despite my ferment.

The ‘blue’ impulse did raise the issue of how much of an angle I might decide to take from any given night’s sky. Normally this wouldn’t matter at all and I wouldn’t even be talking about it except for a certain responsibility I feel, in painting this particular series, to be something of a painter of record. My hope was that if I did in fact paint solid blue clouds, they would somehow also work as an analog for the ‘pictorial’ sky. So that if September 25th were important to you and you wanted a print of the sunset, there would be a relationship between the image and the evening that not only I would see but you might recognize as well. I don’t know that this connection is absolutely necessary, but that’s my thought at the moment.

The question is no longer entirely academic, because I’ve just started to make reproductions of the daily sunsets available (here). The prints in this particular gallery are around 11 x 14 – I can’t make them larger at this point because of camera issues – but with a mat and frame I hope they work for many situations. As soon as I can, I’ll be offering larger prints and posters.

Sunset, Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.A furious heavy rain for most of an hour, then this break showed up in the west, while it was still raining here, and lasted ... just long enough to complicate my life! Within ten minutes it was raining hard again, and the horizon was once again completely gray.

The way sudden changes in the weather ‘complicate’ things got me thinking about how this series is very much a species of performance art – except I’ve done performance art before, and it was nothing like this. Usually one gets to pick and choose the work and plan a show carefully.

To give one example, to fill just three or four minutes of a show, I painted very close copies of the trees in “Trees Between Fields” (a painting you can find on the side of the page here) – except instead of being ten inches tall, painted in oil on canvas, these trees were eight feet tall, spray-painted on styrofoam, and carved out to make ‘sculptures’ that I could move around on the stage. (Nasty stuff, styrofoam, to work with on that scale.) The painting itself took perhaps a year – I used to work very gradually, and in one day might add just a few small glazes – and wasn’t done until I felt I had got it just where I wanted it. The cutouts took an intense couple of weeks.

With the sunsets, whatever I can do within the hour – involving maybe 20 to 30 minutes of actual painting – is what we get, and I never know if I’ll have any idea how to approach that night’s sky. I think it’s pretty surprising, after thousands of these, that before two nights ago (the 8th) I don’t think I’d ever painted a sunset with the rain trailing from the clouds.

But then ‘Howard’ says – you may remember Howard from the D-Day anniversary – “When you’ve seen one sunset, haven’t you pretty much seen ’em all?”

Every once in a while, for a moment or two I wish that that were true. Happily, though, in fact, the situation is more difficult, more ... complicated.

Update on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 08:56AM by BVD

This was the scene as I worked on the painting.

The added element here has to do with the fact that Flint is deathly afraid of thunderstorms, and thinks that staying close to me will afford him some measure of protection. So I was a little bit hindered by the 65-pound foxhound at my feet.

I don’t have any one system or protocol for painting skies – it all depends on the situation. This one was a little unusual in that I had almost completely finished the ‘foreground’ – the gray clouds that had been nearest, above my head – before doing the rest, including the cerulean/gray horizon I’m working on here. I’m painting on an Arches cold-pressed watercolor block, 18 x 24, with margins taped to yield 16 x 20.

And yes, the entire house is filled with sunrise/sunset canvases like those in the background.

The Green Barn (17 May 1984)

Breathing in and out the bird’s song
I sat on the wooden step
Four miles below the sun
Within the mown fields
Of middle May.

Breathing in and out the bird itself as he was singing
I sat on the sun-warped step
Exchanging atmospheres
With middle May
And acres of grass.

I am he who sits in middle May, deciding
To write.

On the fourth anniversary exactly
Of my father’s death
A heart attack at fifty-three
I now thirty-five begin again
Knowing that we never cease.

I of course remember the day
At age fifteen
I set out to paint on canvasboard the local barn,
The green barn
Newly painted
In the orchard hills.

The apple trees were years removed
Shoulders of earth showed hollows and curves
And waves of grass I climbed to meet,
Breasting them with canvasboard.

I tried to paint that green barn.
I used a palette knife.
The greens I made seemed repulsive to me – they were for the green fields, the green of the barn would be impossible without the right green of the flowing fields –
I painted in a sweat
I felt in despair the flowing fields were falling, slipping, even running away with every stroke,
With sweat, sun, bees, greens, no-good greens and so much desperate humid heat and sweat and sun I walked home,
I walked home, balancing the plastered board over barbed wire and gullies and through honeysuckle and under branches until
In the desolate back yard of Dad’s eternally half-finished patio and half-finished hull of a boat (he’d work on it seven more years before selling it not quite completed),
I scraped it all off.

Never again.

Never.

Never again the scraping doubt.
I wish I had that painting today,
I could make it right.
I could make it fourteen million different ways,
In oil, watercolor, pencil or pastel –

Or, like this:

The green barn,
Once a red barn,
Now a gold barn in the summer light,
A gold barn filled with silver blue,
The green barn painted sunlight green over gold and violet reflections,
Floats in the fire green, the sky green, the hard green, white, yellow and wet flowering and dry green
In the me green, heart green, hands and eyes green or turning green,
In the bird and turtle green,
Red and violet and gold.