Sunset, Thursday, 3 September 2009

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

Today I wrote out some of my thoughts on aesthetics. So naturally, tonight’s sunset (which I like) turns out to have almost nothing to do with the specifics I wrote about!

Oh well, treachery is the spice of life. I think Julius Caesar said that. Here’s part of what I wrote ... I keep cutting out the boring parts ... by which I mean the really, indisputably, time-tested boring parts ...

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At some point (around 25 years ago) I started feeling compelled to paint ‘cracks’ in the sky. In “Trees Between Fields” (on the bio page), “fields” had an intentional double or triple meaning – fields of grass, fields of perception, fields of reality. 

It’s no revelation to say that in art everything is more than what it appears to be. For me, the sky seems especially suited to the role of expressing more than itself, because we already tend to see it that way in ordinary life. The sky’s like a screen where we project the events and feelings of each day and night. We’re also accustomed to looking at it as if we’re trying to see through a veil. To quote Sam Cooke, “I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.” If you tell someone, “Well, what’s up there beyond the sky is the exosphere,” you won’t be addressing the question. Beyond the sky, in so many cultures, is visual shorthand for beyond this life.

But when I started painting sunsets, and for each day, I did feel somewhat constrained from painting the way I would if I were just painting any sky. Painting each one, of course, encourages the sense of being almost a ‘painter of record’. A certain fidelity seems called for, so it didn’t make sense or seem right to turn a dull rainy night in October 1997 into a field of blazing gold and orange, if later I was going to say, “Here’s the sunset from the 17th of October, 1997” (or whatever).

There have been exceptions – every once in a while through the years I’ve experimented with different ways of departing from a sort of representational norm. And, since mid-July, I’ve approached these images more and more with my aesthetic, while still keeping a relationship to “the way it is” on a particular night.

The sunset sky can be both an opaque screen and a misty veil. The hybrid of these would be called, in the theater, a scrim. You can project light against it. You can see light behind it.