Sunrise, Tuesday, 20 January 2009

From the Iwo Jima Memorial, Arlington, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 12 x 16.See Inauguration Day for the series of 21 paintings from that day’s sunrise and sunset.

Sunset, Monday, 5 January 2009

Washington, D.C. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20.

This was during my scouting trip for the Inauguration Day paintings – a sort of spooky-intense evening on the Mall, no one around, in freezing rain and sleet. I sketched the sunset, and took a sheaf of the day’s sketches back to my motel room in La Plata, Md., and painted this in the room that night. The subject was daunting, as was figuring out how to paint in oils without hurting the room (required a trip to the hardware store for a big dropcloth) – but it was a blast. I loved it, despite the somewhat modest carefulness of the product. And I ended my three-day reconnaissance completely devoted to the beauty, inner and outer, of the Lincoln Memorial. 

Sunrise, Sunday, 1 January 2006

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunrise from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on canvas, 14 x 18.On New Year’s Day 2006, I resumed the Book of Days, this time adding a painting of each day’s sunrise as well as the sunset. The series began 13 June 1995. At the autumn equinox 1997 I began painting consecutive days – each day’s sunset – and continued through New Year’s Day 1999. Consecutive sunrises and sunsets, beginning with this painting on the morning of 1 January 2006, comprised two complete years, 2006 and 2007. In 2008 I continued painting each sunset.

Sunset, Monday, 22 September 1997

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on canvas, 14 x 18.

Changing skies can seem like a large-scale riot, and very often the only way to avoid getting killed is not to stand by, or stop and study the riot, but jump in and be part of it.

This was the first of the consecutive sunsets – a painting a day of the day itself.

The Sunset (October 1995)

Sunset drags streamers over the horizon, pulls air out of the air, burns color down to ash, consuming every last obstacle of atmosphere, displacing place with time, only to kill time with space. It’s the accumulation of incident carried off for distillation. It brings seizures of realization. Not even slightly romantic in itself, it’s the wrap – sweet, sad, or muddled. It’s the truth. Because it’s the end, it’s the truth.

Sunset, Wednesday, 28 June 1995

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 4 x 6.

This weird little thing is a one-of-a-kind entry in the Book of Days. Below the date, my note on the back says “Imaginary – sky was completely gray.”

I believe the sky that night was a seemingly uniform overcast, covering even the mountains; I know for sure that I didn’t yet know what to do in that case. This, then, comes just before my acceptance of the idea that I’d paint sunset skies no matter what they were like – that this wasn’t a matter of “painting sunsets” but of painting the sky at sunset.