Sunset, Sunday, 24 January 2010

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

Rain showers and very dark at sunset.

Earlier, from inside the woods: The sky cleared, just a while, in the south and east away from the sun. There’s a blue peculiar to this kind of moment – radiant but distant and not quite real, as if waiting in some other realm to be introduced into the world – as if ‘blue’ has just been invented. Obviously I don’t really know what adjectives describe it. Blurred roses of white cloud floated up in it, remnants of rain.

In the woods, the only leaves remaining against the sky were beech, leaves that hang on til March, pale brown to nearly white, curled dry. I didn’t want to dig out pen and paper (my usual portable note pad – a check carbon folded up in my back jeans pocket). So I kept walking and wrote in new blue ink on old beech paper.

Update on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 04:36PM by BVD

This image is available as a fine art print, here.

Sunset, Friday, 22 January 2010

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

I don’t know what’s with all the subaquatic imagery lately: I was out in a big field this afternoon after the sleet and rain had ended, and the sun started to burn into the clouds in the upper southwest corner of the sky, creating a ring of thinning white in the deep cold gray. Soon I could see the sun glaring in the center of the ring. I had the sudden thought that God was going ice fishing, and all of us down here were the fish.

Sunset, Thursday, 21 January 2010

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

Rain verging on sleet and snow – the approach of our old friend ‘wintry mix’.

I’m not sure anyone wants to see a rainy sunset on a wall calendar or, if today’s their birthday, receive a print of their special day as all gray. These are not merely commercial considerations – perhaps the time will come when I can find and show something of the inner nature of an outwardly dark day.

Sunset, Wednesday, 20 January 2010

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

A cold rain at sunset.

The so-called Alley Field is a sloping area of some four or five acres of grass with a narrow lane at its entrance; the alley runs from a broken metal gate next to a small tangled dell of honey locust, blackberry and wild rose, then opens into the field.

Along one border, over the past couple of years, big oaks have been falling into the field – first one in a windstorm, then one after heavy rains, and another – and then yesterday I found a 60- to 70-foot red oak had simply heaved up out of its roots and crashed out onto the grass like a building in the street.

What’s funny – sort of – about these trees is that all of them have been very much alive. On yesterday’s oak I couldn’t even find the typical one big dead branch anywhere, and all the twigs were in bud and flexible. Yet a huge oak on the very same fenceline, a neighbor to all these collapsers, bleached dead for decades, which I’d cut 95% of the way through and then tried to help along to its fate by driving seven big iron wedges into the cut, refuses to fall, or budge, or even teeter just a little for me. No felling, no firewood. Kind of embarrassing.

Turns out the tree has a structure well known to timberers – and it’s the reason I originally didn’t just go ahead and cut through the remaining 5% of the trunk. It has two major upper portions of canopy, two massive uplifted limbs, almost perfectly balanced. So you can have no idea which way it’ll break – for example, on you.

Dangerous types of trees earn names from wood-cutters. A tree hung up on another is called a Widowmaker – a name that has effectively deterred me every time I’ve been tempted to mess with one. This other type of tree – the equally divided one – is called a Schoolmarm. Can’t make up its mind. Do you think these lumberjacks might have been just a little bit sexist?

Sunset, Sunday, 17 January 2010

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

If someone you were very fond of was celebrating their 60th birthday, you too might dispense with caution and embarrassment, dust off Garageband, grab the Taylor 410 (for sale, if anyone’s interested), and look up the chords to “You’re Sixteen,” which was #8 when Johnny Burnette did it in 1960, and #1 when Ringo Starr covered it in 1974, apparently with help from Paul McCartney (on the kazoo?) and Harry Nilsson. Anyway, the chords, the changes, were a lot more interesting than I expected, no offense intended to those performers.

Then you might send that person a little song, including:

You stepped out of a dream
Off of the farm
Now you’re our Sandy divine
You’re sixty
So beautiful
And so fine

She really did come right from the farm.

You also might try to make sure that ‘her’ sunset, even though it’s been raining all day, didn’t look like a complete washout.

Sunset, Sunday, 13 December 2009

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

Mist and fog everywhere at sunset, after heavy rains.

I’m a fan of small mountains – perhaps because I like to imagine living within the world they create, a varied but accessible landscape. My favorite small mountain, I’ve finally just learned, in Madison County, Virginia, is named Thorofare. (Not the much higher and larger Thorofare Mountain up on the Blue Ridge and also, as it happens, in Madison.) The sight of it from Route 29 – I think if I lived with that as my view I might not be able to stop painting it. And having said this much, I guess I now owe you at least a sketch, as soon as I can get back there.

The other day on my trip up to Great Falls, I was passing near Thorofare Mountain while the radio was playing something I ordinarily find dull – and I even felt that way when I was 12 and it was #1 – Connie Francis, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.” This time it struck me in a new way, and made me think about how the original emotional meaning of a song can become transposed, over the years, from personal romance to something much bigger. I realized, looking at the mountain, what a fool somebody can be for this world.