Artist’s Statement

MOMENT & HORIZON begins with a simple daily event, the sunset. 

The sunset may seem like a far from obvious choice as a subject for a serious artist. It was not obvious to me, even after years of painting every sunset, every day, a project begun in 1995. There have been many times when I doubted the sense of what I was doing, or the validity and significance of the work.

I painted the sunset without really knowing the reasons. I painted them on faith, and that may always be the case to some extent. But I’ve come to understand that I did start doing this for a reason: I’ve always been concerned with communicating layers of meaning in the moment.

MOMENT & HORIZON could be considered conceptual art, and for a long time that’s what I assumed it must be. But by now I realize that for me this work is about much more than any concept, such as the idea of recording time and place. 

The concept – including the regular discipline involved, the loyalty and the responsibility to each day – is important to the work. Yet the art is not about the work that goes into it. This became especially clear to me in January 2011, when I was able to exhibit all the sunsets of 2010 in one space. The work is about the art that comes out of it. It’s about the experience it’s able to create.

At first, I assumed I was painting the sky. Eventually I realized I was looking for the painting in the sky.

Although sunsets are famously beautiful, MOMENT & HORIZON is about finding language, pictorial and otherwise, that can translate their power – the power of the moment. For me, the sunset stands for the significance of any moment of experience. Both moment and horizon are doorways into what may lie beyond them.

The Ongoing Series

On most evenings you’ll find today’s sunset near the top of the home page. On rare occasions the painting may not appear until the next day or later. 

The Moment & Horizon series dates from June 1995. I painted more than 400 sunsets, plus sunrises and moonrises, between 1995 and 1997 – nine years before the “painting a day” movement is said to have begun. The first completely consecutive series – painting every sunset – began at the fall equinox, September 22nd, 1997. I painted the sunset every day, “in real time,” at 14x18, and continued through 1998. I resumed the series at the beginning of 2006. For two complete years, 2006–2007, I also painted each sunrise. I continue painting every sunset, as I’ve done since January 1st, 2006. 

So, when archiving is completed, you’ll be able to find here every sunset from 2006 through the present, every sunrise of 2006–2007, every sunset from September 1997 through 1998, and hundreds of sunsets and sunrises from 1995–1997. Posting of daily sunsets here began April 16th, 2009. 

The entire collection of more than 3,300 paintings has been kept unbroken; until January 2011, none had yet been offered for sale. With the exhibition Moment & Horizon: The 365 Sunsets of 2010, individual paintings were available for the first time.

Painting Archives

The calendar archive arranges the paintings by month – for example, all sunset paintings for October 2009 can be found in one calendar-style array and viewed as a gallery. For the paintings that preceded the start of this blog (April 2009), archiving is under way; there are still more than 2,500 sunrise and sunset paintings to be shot and organized. Until we have complete months to show for those earlier years, the paintings that have been shot will be arranged simply by year.

William Van Doren

Bill lives in the Stony Point area of Albemarle County, outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, Laura Owen Sutherland. A biographical sketch can be found here.