Sunset, Sunday, 28 March 2010

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

It would be difficult to exaggerate how dark it was at sunset – almost like night, completely overcast with a steady heavy rain, and a strange subliminal blue-green behind the wall of gray.

Sunset, Thursday, 25 March 2010

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

Fixing to rain.

Sunset, Friday, 12 March 2010

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

Rain, and clouds so low they seem to be rolling through the tree branches. Which brings up a question many people seem to have: “What do you do when you can’t see the sunset?”

You can always see the sunset, even if you can’t see the sun set.

Font

Such a tiny writing
This hand I'm composing in
So expandable in the repackaging
By fonts
That can, however,
Do nothing to enlarge the thought
Nor can small type diminish
The day
This morning
Heavy rainstorms
Rivers surging
Land and sea emerging
One oceanic face.

Sunset, Thursday, 11 March 2010

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

Not raining ... yet.

Sunset, Monday, 22 February 2010

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

Many ages ago (in blog terms – December 9th) I wrote about a word I’d encountered in the Edgar Allan Poe story “Mystification.” The word was uniquity – Poe used it to refer to the quality of being unique, and I had to go back to a 1955 version of The Oxford Universal Dictionary to find it.

In that post, thinking I was pretty cute, I referred to my ‘obliquity’ – believing I was cleverly making up a word.

Last night I began reading the Poe story “The Man That Was Used Up” – when what to my wondering eyes should appear:

They [his eyes] were of a deep hazel, exceedingly large and lustrous; and there was about them, ever and anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression.

Well, shoot. Turns out obliquity’s “even more of a word” than uniquity – it’s in current dictionaries, and seems to be used to describe the degree of an oblique angle, in addition (perhaps) to the way I used it. Obliquity – I should have noticed even my spell-check didn’t mind it.

I think in France they call this tragiquité. Well, O.K., maybe not.

Meanwhile, sunset tonight is fog and a lingering cold rain. The dense granular snow and the air seem to be meeting as some sort of middle substance between slowly melting snow and solidifying atmosphere.