Friday
Sep252009

Sunset, Friday, 25 September 2009

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

All day it’s been gray here – damp and drab. As it became apparent it was going to stay that way, I started almost to obsess about rebelling against the overcast and perhaps painting ‘blue clouds’. I had ‘blue clouds’ on the brain as I surveyed the horizon one more time and started to paint.

But what one has in mind and what comes out of the brush – out of real impulse rather than a mere idea – are often two very different things. I didn’t really get the radically blue clouds I had pictured and in fact started, after a layer of white, with sepia – a brown – almost everywhere. And then a gray made mostly from ultramarine blue, yellow ochre and the Gamblin mixture called brown-pink. And so on – not so much blue and not a departure, despite my ferment.

The ‘blue’ impulse did raise the issue of how much of an angle I might decide to take from any given night’s sky. Normally this wouldn’t matter at all and I wouldn’t even be talking about it except for a certain responsibility I feel, in painting this particular series, to be something of a painter of record. My hope was that if I did in fact paint solid blue clouds, they would somehow also work as an analog for the ‘pictorial’ sky. So that if September 25th were important to you and you wanted a print of the sunset, there would be a relationship between the image and the evening that not only I would see but you might recognize as well. I don’t know that this connection is absolutely necessary, but that’s my thought at the moment.

The question is no longer entirely academic, because I’ve just started to make reproductions of the daily sunsets available (here). The prints in this particular gallery are around 11 x 14 – I can’t make them larger at this point because of camera issues – but with a mat and frame I hope they work for many situations. As soon as I can, I’ll be offering larger prints and posters.

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