Sunset, Wednesday, 27 January 2010

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

I don’t quite feel that I can, so I’ll let Prince:

Put the right letters together
And make a better day.

Sunset, Tuesday, 26 January 2010

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

I’d heard of word clouds. This afternoon (when it wasn’t yet overcast) I started looking for cloud words.

slate – asphalt – pavement – stone

wraith – fragment – shred – ice – cold

temple-like – pagoda-roofed – Le Corbusier

screen – sheer – scrim – glare – glaze – mica – isinglass

flat – pancaked – held between palms – heaven on one hand – on the other hand, earth

gray-blue – blue-gray – blue – gray

geographic – territorial – map-like – coastline – blue lagoon – bay – continental drift

And not least:

stratocumulus

Sunset, Monday, 25 January 2010

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

Out today after last night’s deluge and the resulting floods, it was easy to see in the untracked mud that no one else had been in the “back thousand acres” of this place where we rent – in fact no one’s been back there since deer hunting ended three weeks ago.

(The Rivanna at flood, by the way, was amazing to see, close-up in the woods.)

The first thing I thought (smug) was, wow, I guess these guys never come back here if they can’t shoot at deer. But then I realized, wait a minute, what if we hadn’t gotten Flint (the foxhound), who needs to run? How often would we come back here – how often did we come here, before we found him (late 2001) at the Fluvanna County SPCA, convinced by the shelter’s benign speculation that he was a mellow half-Lab?

Answer: Almost never.

It’s not just hunters. A lot of us need another reason, or we just don’t seem to get out much anymore.

Sunset, Saturday, 23 January 2010

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

Firmament on parchment.

Sunset, Tuesday, 19 January 2010

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

Out in the fields/woods, while Flint chased what he contended was a fox, it was a transitional day – or a day that gave the illusion of transition. With a mild west breeze, it was more like margins of January and margins of March and April overlapped, throwing the day out of time. Patches of granular icy snow bordered lanes of thawed mud the more slippery for overlaying frozen earth. Ahead on the jeep trail, the sun bounced off a wet mat of dead leaves and snow melt. In the cutover field of scrubby trees, the immature trees let in the strong sunlight, but today you could believe it was the force of the sun that blasted the field and stunted the trees.

The sun was merely making a feint toward another season. For someone like me, with my vague grasp of the calculus behind the duration of winter, it seems on a day like this that the sun can do anything, that it can hold back and keep winter here, or pour down and make winter spring.

Sunset, Monday, 18 January 2010

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