Sunset, Sunday, 28 February 2010

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

In many ways the close of February felt like a typical cold March day. Some color came into the sky about 30 minutes before sunset, then retreated before the wind. I whistled for a little of it to come on back.

February’s sunsets can be seen all at one time, here.

Sunset, Wednesday, 17 February 2010

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

The air was cold, the fields still securely clamped in snow, and even the colors had something of a typical cold drained winter evening about them, but a few clouds looked suspiciously like banners of spring.

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, Tuesday, 19 January 2010

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

Out in the fields/woods, while Flint chased what he contended was a fox, it was a transitional day – or a day that gave the illusion of transition. With a mild west breeze, it was more like margins of January and margins of March and April overlapped, throwing the day out of time. Patches of granular icy snow bordered lanes of thawed mud the more slippery for overlaying frozen earth. Ahead on the jeep trail, the sun bounced off a wet mat of dead leaves and snow melt. In the cutover field of scrubby trees, the immature trees let in the strong sunlight, but today you could believe it was the force of the sun that blasted the field and stunted the trees.

The sun was merely making a feint toward another season. For someone like me, with my vague grasp of the calculus behind the duration of winter, it seems on a day like this that the sun can do anything, that it can hold back and keep winter here, or pour down and make winter spring.