Sunset, Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.For the first time in my blogging life I’ll be traveling, tomorrow through Saturday, and decided that, at least for this first trip, hauling everything – easel, paint, palette, rags, dropcloth AND camera, tripod, lights, etc., etc. – and painting, shooting and posting from a hotel room and somehow doing this without putting unsolicited clouds and sunlight on the nice wallpaper – is probably a bit much. So I will be writing here – albeit somewhat more erratically, as we’re also celebrating Laura’s birthday – and, if possible, posting whatever photos of sketches or other artifacts of the trip I can rustle up to stand in for the paintings until they finally go up on Sunday the 31st. Look for sunsets from [name withheld because Laura doesn’t know].

Depending on where you live, calling a dip in the temperature from the 80s to the upper 50s a touch of  ‘winter’ may seem laughable, but, as you may know, I’ve been on the lookout for something we might call blackberry winter. We have something like it, even if it’s only been since around noon and it’ll probably be gone tomorrow. When the rain and wind blow through the windows you’d been opening for relief from the heat and you feel like starting a little fire in the woodstove, that’s good enough for me.

But I was noticing yesterday, when I was out with Flint, that half of the blackberry blossoms have fallen off and given way to the developing green berries. I need to come up with whatever blooms right after. So I give you the false winter of the wild rose.

Sunset, Monday, 11 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.If you paint sunsets, and I guess particularly if you paint a lot of them – O.K., I mean, especially if you paint every single last one of them and need to clean your brushes and scrub your hands before you can even touch the camera and begin the process of posting – there is often a temptation to cheat just a little, as in, “Oh, c’mon, the sky’s obviously not going to change in the next 15 minutes, maybe I can paint now and not wait ... ” 

And it seems that at least every other night for the last couple of weeks, if I had done that, I would have missed some completely unexpected phenomenon that didn’t even appear possible until the very last moment – determined gray skies, usually, that decided to burn themselves in a bright flame before they left.

Tonight, again, I thought the same thing – a cloud cover had come along and I thought, “What you see is what you’re gonna get.”

Wrong again! – except this time, the change was in the opposite direction. Out of the moderate cover came an arc of cloud that made me go check and see if “wall of doom” was in the forecast.

Instead of a predicted wall of doom, we had “a slight chance of showers.” Radar did show a wall of something, and I turned the usual view a little farther north to get more of it.

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The high temperature dropped 20 degrees today, and when I was out with Flint I saw the blackberry blossoms were about halfway out. I was tempted to call today blackberry winter, but I’m going to hold out for a longer, more dramatic cool snap, a true ‘spell’ of weather, preferably when most of the blossoms are out.

The wild blueberries are all in bloom, though, so I’ll designate today a touch of huckleberry autumn.

Sunset, Monday, 4 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.At the very last minute, a weird cloud space opened up in a resolutely cold blue-gray sky – I guess meteorologists or pilots might call it a new cloud deck – with unexpected colors. The sky behind the streaks was not open as it might appear here but a sort of flat high yellowy silver.

When I was out with Flint today – my six- or seven-mile walk, his more than 10-mile ramble – I saw the blackberry blossoms were just barely beginning to come out. It was tempting to think the chilly wet weather of the last three days might be a case of Blackberry Winter, but it’s still a bit early for that here. Usually, in Virginia, it’s one to three days of 50s and even 40s while the blossoms are really out, which means, it’s a bit of a come-down for Spring. Last year we didn’t seem to have a Blackberry Winter at all. In other parts of the South, of course, the blossoms come out much sooner, and the change in weather can be very serious, as I found out today from a blog by someone in the Ozarks.

I want to note an addition to my “Friends I Do Know” list, and that’s Minás, which is the name of a wonderful artist as well as the name of his boutique and gallery in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. Hampden’s the home of the annual Honfest, which is coming up on June 13th and 14th (hon).

To those who checked my post for last night’s sunset before this morning: I’ve added a link so that you can see the Hassam painting I mentioned, the one whose “rose tone” stayed with me for so long.