Sunset, Tuesday, 8 December 2009

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

I expect we all have missing or unfinished ‘works’, in whatever medium – painting, music, writing, home renovation, business, housework, cooking ... Hey, I just realized those weren’t just hypothetical examples, I qualify for all of them! Sad ...

Anyway, the Missing Works are usually the greatest, of course, since they live only in imagination and have never been made physically real. Today started with one: a painting of the sunrise. I also ‘saw’ two paintings of the mid-morning sky, but there was time only for the sunset, now that the clouds have come and we’re getting pelted with sleet.

The sunrise had a bright green sky close to the horizon on the right, or toward the south, just a bit of open sky above the low dark humped backs of the nearby Southwest Mountains. Toward the center and left clouds reaching up over the mountains were flame colors with slight ‘imperfections’ of dark, dull or whitish streaks that only made the colors seem more intense – burnished gold, golden rose, and a shade I’m not sure has a name but a gold-rose-magenta, all of which, in the painting, might have started as different combinations of Rose Madder Lake and Naples Yellow but then other colors would have needed to come in, brighter yellows, whites, crimsons, until the strange alchemy might be complete. And since this work is missing, I can assure you it was quite complete.

Above this horizon, higher clouds were veils of violet dust screening a sky of several interpenetrated blue pigments that, though still subdued and dark, burst out something like a deep drumbeat of the morning, just beginning. And since this is a missing work, I can assert that the sound could actually be heard in the painting.

Sunset, Wednesday, 2 December 2009

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

I’m sure there are plenty of other bloggers who have to fix a chainsaw in the pouring rain while composing an entry and watching the sunset in order to post a daily painting. We could form a professional association. The name doesn’t really matter, as long as it makes the acronym M E N T A L.

I’ve been catching up with an old friend who was a significant person in my life, and she wrote something I found quite striking. We were both once strict “laissez-faire libertarians,” part of a group that, at the time, would have objected to being labeled ‘conservative’. However, conservative is what we were, when you get down to it; some in our old cohort have even since slithered on over into that grotto called neoconservatism.

In any event, her comment was somehow the most accessible explanation I’ve seen for why a person would mature into a liberal.

I have moved way across the spectrum since the early days of knowing you and today would shamelessly describe myself as a tax-and-spend liberal. One of my biggest frustrations is with the reluctance of the American people to devote themselves and their money to creating a more robust community and to assuring a more satisfying life experience for others sharing the planet at the very same moment in time.

Simple humanity and common sense.

Sunset, Monday, 30 November 2009

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

Rain at sunset. The month of November can be seen in a calendar array here.

Last night I was reacquainted, via radio, with Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Sweet Cherry Wine,” which came out in 1969, a top 10 hit wedged between two of their monsters, “Crimson and Clover” (#1) and “Crystal Blue Persuasion” (#2). 

As great as his records were, I don’t think of Tommy James as the kind of artist who was ever ahead of his time or who would lead his audience in a new direction, except maybe in the area of guitar and vocal effects. Despite the trippy lyrics, in terms of depth or heft, he was closer to, say, Lou Christie than Leonard Cohen. But to me this just makes some of the things he said in his songs that much more interesting – because he wasn’t saying anything amazing or surprising, he was saying what ‘everybody’ (of a certain generation) ‘knew’ to be the case. And it struck me as a little sad to think how mistaken Tommy, and we, may have been.

About a specific issue like Vietnam he was completely right:

Oh yeah, yesterday my friends were marching out to war
Oh yeah, listen now we ain’t a-marching anymore
No we ain’t gonna fight, only God has the right
To decide who’s to live and die

About the underlying situation, I realize of course it’s hardly news to say that people in the Sixties were ... uh ... a tad overoptimistic.

Watch the mountain turn to dust and blow away
Oh Lord, you know there’s got to be a better way
And the old masquerade is a no-soul parade
Marchin’ through the ruins of time

(Having listened again to the song after going to five different lyrics sites, it really is ‘blow’ away, not ‘glow’ away as every site has it; I assumed it was a ‘no-show’ parade, but the sites are all correct with ‘no-soul’.)

In any event, it may not be just children of the Sixties – I think Americans in general are naive about power, and tend to assume, for example, that when a new party gains the presidency, the locus of power changes as well. But to touch only briefly on a huge subject, the international network that supported BCCI and Iran-Contra in the 1980s didn’t decide to fold up and go bye-bye just because Bill Clinton was in the White House. Add neoconservatives and the old masquerade’s new again.

I love the song, but the ruins of time may be holding up awfully well.

Sunset, Thanksgiving, 26 November 2009

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

At sunset a few drops of rain began falling on my brother Steve’s face as he napped in the hammock, in two blankets.

Inside, my sister Emily, here from Indiana, told everyone about 350.org.

We called our brother Mike, camping with his family and his father-in-law in Seminole Canyon, in Texas, and left him a raucous Thanksgiving voicemail.

Laura called her sister Mary Scott, who was in Lynchburg, Virginia, with the rest of their family.

My niece Jody missed her fiance, Jason.

My niece Ashley and her husband, Erik, were texting with their friend Dan, anchor on a local newscast, while he was trying to cope with a program cut ever shorter by the Cowboys-Raiders game.

Sandy, my sister-in-law, had just come through a grueling several weeks of medical tests, results of which she and Steve got just yesterday. Thanksgiving was thanksgiving. Sandy did an impersonation of the turkey that gets saved by the White House.

Sunset, Monday, 23 November 2009

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

Today, in the rain, I caught myself looking appraisingly at certain long-dead trees hung up and leaning in the woods – trees that could be, at first glance, either a cedar or a pine. That’s because pine is almost always useless for burning in a wood stove, and cedar (in my opinion, not shared by everyone) is fantastic. It was kind of a silly exercise because this was a place where I can’t go wood-cutting, but I think it was a reflex left over from a winter fifteen years ago.

Back then I was renting a circa 1845 farmhouse off Scuffletown Road in Orange County, Virginia, more than a mile from my nearest neighbor, and heating almost exclusively with an old wood stove and wood I was cutting myself. Along one of the fencelines, for about a quarter-mile at the border between a big field and the woods, at least two dozen very large cedars had been blown down, or pushed over, years before, perhaps decades before. All had fallen back into the woods and were completely dry, bleached white-gray like huge wrecks of driftwood. The wood inside was deep red. Heartwood.

I ended up using every last one of the fallen trees, and they were just enough to get me through. For me this was a year of reflection and restoration, and the fragrant burning cedar seemed to ‘smudge’ not just my house but me. I marveled how it burned so cleanly, with almost no ash. This was the period immediately before I began the sunset paintings. Anything I do today I owe in part to the Cedars of Scuffletown.

Sunset, Thursday, 19 November 2009

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

Rain pouring down this morning prompted a strange dream sequence of thoughts – or what our friend E. A. Poe might have termed a ‘fancy’ – speculating on what happens to the rain when it falls – if it remembers in some way, in any sense at all, how it fell, and its life in the sky, as it sinks into the ground or runs off in streams, earthbound – if the rain ever knows any sense of returning when it rises as vapor, burned up by the sun, pulled up into clouds – if the same generations of rain ever return to form the same clouds, if only for an instant, if only as a sport. And if I could perhaps catch them at it.

Although I don’t believe visual evidence is needed for any painting, I did see bands of blue and violet tonight, as afterimages of a pervasive gray. Still raining at sunset.