Sunset, Monday, 26 October 2009

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

Autumn Leaves

The light coming down into the dirt road early this afternoon divided the woods with broad bluish beams of sun, dust, smoke and shadow – a medium that contains and conducts autumn. The gold beech leaves and green beech leaves, the orange cherry leaves, the lemon yellow, bright gold and old gold hickory leaves, the green hawthorn leaves with glossy black berries and, somehow nearby on the same tree, the yellowing hawthorn leaves with glossy red berries, told each other jokes about the significance of color. Actually, I think they were singing happy little musical comedies about the changing colors. I couldn’t quite make it out, but I could swear one of the scenarios was a satire involving an artist who has to get red and yellow from a tube. 

Further on, maple leaves littered the road, almost all of them half yellow, half red – half fluorescent yellow, half deep scarlet – mottled with black. As I looked ahead, walking, the road was half yellow, half red, mottled with black, the sky half yellow, half red, mottled black, I held out my arms and looked at the palms of my hands, half yellow, half red, and black, my skin had the lingering sheen of a recently fallen leaf.

Sunset, Sunday, 25 October 2009

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

Skies to the west were clear; I turned almost 90° to the south for this view.

The following comes from 1993, two years before I started painting the sunset. Over the top – literally – but perhaps a sign that the series to come was not an accident.

Twilight, and the world becoming more real with each moment, approaching the peak of reality halfway between dark and light. Night is superimposed on the day; day is visible in the night; trees, their leaves, are still distinct, yet deny their own primacy as they take on darkness. The sky is filled with light leaving; dark coming. The axis we turn on is like a Ferris wheel stopping for elongated seconds to give each passenger at least one shot at the view from the top. At the invisible borderline of rose and indigo, possibilities are endless either way; inconceivable both ways. I follow the sun, attend the moon, doubling easily, without effort, in the mild evening air. I stretch from here, to there, facing in, out. I become a revolving sphere looking within and without, with and without itself. Boundaries soft and sweet as the air; I suddenly expand, taking in the high clouds my face and eyes, the sweep of the woods my shoulders, the curve of the fields my arms, the ponds my vital organs, the geese flying up the ponds my voice, I’m soaring above the house, the trees in the yard my legs, and now even these attributes dissolve and I expand again, insubstantial, higher, higher, farther, at peace, even as I sit in the deck chair with its aluminum frame and frayed plastic webbing. Twilight time.

Sunset, Saturday, 24 October 2009

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

You Shoulda Heard Just What I Seen

I was walking in the overgrown field not far from the river and a light rain had been falling only a little while. I noticed the smell – quite distinct yet hardly there. Not earthy, not a wet, rainy smell, just a subtle autumnal under-fragrance of dry vegetation, probably released by the rain. I even tried to sniff out a specific source – the many little white blown-out goldenrod flowers, the yellowing tall grass, the scrubby pines, the dry clusters of dark garnet sumac, glistening green-gold-red leaves of blackjack oak – it was everywhere and nowhere. 

It stayed with me as I walked through the woods. Funny how smell as it passes through a person can recover fugitive memory – cat-tails and rushes at the edge of a familiar pond from long ago, near Manassas – and trigger unexpected imagery ... 

A legion of Roman soldiers, having lost their way, is encamped in a field near a river. Somewhere near Lourdes they had snagged a sort of space-time tripwire, and now they’re bivouacked on the upper Mississippi. One day they were in Gaul, the next, near St. Paul. It’s as yet unnamed, of course, but one of the legionnaires, secretly a member of a persecuted sect, has in his possession a document that will one day become known as The First Letter of Paul to the Minnesotans. The legion wanders in the direction they think will bring them to Rome, and eventually makes it to the Atlantic coast, where they encounter Icelandic wayfarers who ferry them to their island home. Hence the name, the Minnesota Vikings. 

Could be the makings of an 1100-page saga. In the sequel, the legionnaires in Iceland get geometaphysically flipped again, this time onto Easter Island. 

And to think, I haven’t seen an episode of Lost in over a year ...

Finally, a little coda – I was listening to this during last night’s sunset. “Who Do You Love” ... Bo Diddley.

The night was dark but the sky was blue
Down the alley an ice wagon flew
Hit a bump and somebody screamed
You shoulda heard just what I seen.

Sunset, Friday, 23 October 2009

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

Overcast and about to rain.

I was driving through the Alley Field (named for the narrow lane of grass at its entrance) with the firewood I’d just cut, when a fantastically vivid red leaf fluttered down through the branches in the woods just to my left – at an odd angle – and a little too fast. 

Cardinal.