Sunset, Sunday, 8 November 2009

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

Driving home from Charlottesville today, on a perfect Indian Summer late afternoon (if you didn’t get the memo about Indian Summer, it was here), I was struck by the difference between the scale of what we can see, or notice, while we’re rushing between places or tasks or errands, and what we can actually spend time with and get to know. The cases in point were beautiful trees, one along High Street and another near the beginning of Hydraulic Road, of all places. In each case, although in different ways, there was the peculiar November picture of bare branches mixed with the remaining leaves – gold sunlit limbs reaching to the roadside, and scatterings of leaves still part green, part yellow or orange, part dry brown, in the slanted light. I felt the impulse to stop and really look at them, but as it was there wasn’t even time to tell if they were sycamores or oaks or maples or something else altogether. Driving down the road, or just going through a workday, can mean glimpsing dozens of possible paintings or stories but not being able to paint or tell any of them. Sunset and sunrise solve this problem, in the sense that they are both something to see and a period of time in which to see them – the visual and the temporal together. As I’ve tried to suggest elsewhere, they have as much to do with an appreciation of time as with any pictorial qualities. And, conveniently, they take up the entire sky – it’s very difficult to drive past the sunset.

Sunset, Saturday, 7 November 2009

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

The setting sun throws a golden-yellow block of light against the oaks, the small cedars and vines along the fence, and the house, and in the middle of this bright space, my black shadow. Looking at my shadow I feel I’m real, much more than if I were seeing my reflection, because I displace light. We only displace light because we are its different form. The shadow of what I say as it reaches you, this is evidence of my light, and yours – we meet in the shadows.

Sunset, Friday, 6 November 2009

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

Every day we see the world turn upside down, and on a clear night like this it seems as if all the color falls out of the sky. I’ve tried to hold some of it back.

Sunset, Thursday, 5 November 2009

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

All along the hours guardians are posted who would help me if I would let them, from morning through night they accompany me, in rotation, and on emergency call. All they want is for me to look up and let in light, a space of feeling and remembering – strangely enough they want to help me get grounded. I see them as sentinels posted at intervals, although I suppose any one is available at any time. They move in colors, like illuminated smoke, they walk with me, and they talk with me, I mean to listen. Everything alive and possibly even not alive around me conducts their messages. The cats cleaning themselves so nonchalantly here in our living room – what fakers, they’re antennae. Fakirs. All of us, the things we say to each other, you reading this now, any random person on the street, we’re informing and guiding each other. As difficult as it is to believe in a given situation, no matter what we say or do, we are each other’s guardian angels.

Sunset, Wednesday, 4 November 2009

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

During the night, the paulownia tree by the house shed its leaves. Paulownia leaves don’t change color and gently fall, their green sours, then one night they freeze stiff – big and curled – and in the morning drop nearly all at once. As the sun came up this morning I heard them hitting the ground in quick succession, clinking against each other like pieces of china.

Among them I found a perfect paulownia flower, a tightly wrapped purple bud. I had to laugh at the fellow traveler. 180° out of season, it had waited for a different way to unfurl.

Sunset, Tuesday, 3 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Southwest Mountains, from U.S. 29 North, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This is very much a southern view of the sunset, a perspective not very far to the right of the sunrise painting in the previous post. The west was blocked by a rise of big cedars and pines next to the polling place, and election officers are not allowed to go wandering off in search of a better view.