Sunset, Monday, 12 October 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This seems to be an evening to mention subjects I can’t write about quite yet.

I’ve been sneaking up on the idea of writing about Edgar Allan Poe’s beautiful story “The Island of the Fay,” which I’ve read about five times in the last week. I think I finally see a way ... soon.

If I can’t write about Poe (at one time considered by his peers to be a gifted athlete), that of course leaves us with baseball. For now, all I can do is ask how excruciating it would be if the Colorado Rockies made it to the World Series and we had to watch night baseball from Denver in late October.

More about that, too, another time. Sun’s about to set on what has been a chilly and, until just about this moment, overcast day.

Sunset, Sunday, 11 October 2009

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

A note on how e-mail and, perhaps even more than that, Facebook, have altered the playing field for writers. “West Hollywood,” a poem from 1982 that I posted the other day, originally had two exclamation points that were very important to the piece – but my spouse observed, and I realized she was right, that these would not register the same way now. I took them out.

Exclamation points are now anything but exceptional in everyday communication. I started adding them more and more to my own e-mails, simply from the awareness that without them most of my correspondents might think what I was saying sounded flat, cold or even angry. They’re almost useless!

We agreed Walt Whitman might have a tough time if he were writing today.

Sunset, Saturday, 10 October 2009

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

I’m happy to report that the October 1st sunset, as seen from the field at Scott Stadium at the University of Virginia shortly before MUSE took the stage to open for U2, has finally been posted.

Complex man-made structures, if I don’t have an opportunity to paint them live on the spot, can be tricky for me to deal with. When I’m painting directly from the scene, there’s little danger that I will plan or overthink – everything just happens. But if I carry away a detailed sketch and then try to reconstruct that scene, art can lose itself in an earnest attempt to RECONSTRUCT THAT SCENE. I painted that (October 1st) sky only when I was ready to treat the stadium the way I would anything else, leave out anything I cared to leave out, make it personal, simply deal with it naturally. Had I painted on the spot, I know I would have put in something for the tall narrow light standards, but working from a sketch this would have been architectural and deadly.

I did the sketch on the back of the top of a mini pizza box I ‘borrowed’ from a neighbor down in the General Admission standing area. (She’d finished her dinner.) Those little box lids make nice sketch surfaces – the flared sides create almost a shadowbox effect – mini pizza cartons, suitable for hanging.

Update on Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 08:13PM by BVD

Here’s the sketch for the 1st. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I’d left my sketchbook in the car ...

Flip It Over, It’s Domino’s! Inside dimensions approx. 7.5 x 7.25.

Sunset, Friday, 9 October 2009

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

Road to Leesburg

Around the trees
Light was thick and dusty gold
Currents
Heavier than air
Where
Secrets of the ring
The crown
The sun
The moon
The throne
Are told
Are found.

West Hollywood, 1982

Vacant lot, you’re a world unto yourself. 
I thrill to stop and gaze into you.
I see crusted truck tracks through an old puddle, a topography – a topography for Christ’s sake, 
I’m so hungry to see some shape in the dirt,
I see borderlines of tall weeds 
And grass growing in bunches of an infinite variety of heights. 
Even your tin cans look good – they’re so crumpled and dusty.
Vacant lot, I ache, I literally ache when I see you. 
How long will they let you go on like this?