Sunset, Tuesday, 16 February 2010

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

Cutting wood (again! – one of the drawbacks of renting an uninsulated farmhouse) in the hour before sunset, I was watching an ever bigger and more golden sun drop through the clouds and thinking – oddly enough, for the first time – about the difference, if there is one, between painting space (a scene, a person, a thing) and painting time (like the sunset).

I looked away from the sun and noticed, down a narrow park-like draw that forms a stream and leads into the woods, that most of a cedar had been broken in two by the snows – one tall half of the canopy lay to the left of a shattered remaining ten feet of trunk, and the other side, just as tall, had fallen to the right.

The snow split the tree. The sun split day and night. And I still couldn’t articulate the difference, if there is one, between painting space and painting time.

Sunset, Sunday, 14 February 2010

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

In order to make a Valentine’s Day sunset I had decided, and was fully prepared, to make up a sky if necessary. I was thinking of a cadmium red and alizarin crimson sun on a field of rose. I was ready to jump the shark. But then the sky started taking the matter out of my hands. Forty minutes before sunset I was surprised to see a heart-shaped opening in the clouds. Seriously. It wasn’t there at sunset – instead, at sunset there was a very large heart-shaped cloud formation to the west and south, right over a glowing rosy red orange horizon. I’m not lying – a heart in the sky. So, even if you didn’t get one, you got one. As you should.

Update on Monday, February 22, 2010 at 11:24AM by BVD

Available as a fine art print, framed or plain, from Imagekind.

Sunset, Saturday, 13 February 2010

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on Arches watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Funny, as soon as I started to write this I thought of the old hymn “Work, For The Night Is Coming,” which my grandmother used to sing at her piano and we would sing with her. But to work while seeing the sun set can bring a sense of contemplation to the process. I think of times, both during this series and otherwise, when I’d have to be out on a back road somewhere cutting firewood at sunset. If I was painting sunsets, of course I’d have to watch while I was working. But even if I wasn’t about to paint, the picture of time passing, of day falling into night, brought all kinds of feelings to what I was doing. Sometimes it might be something close to self-pity that I was out getting wood just before dark – as if I were the peasant in “Good King Wenceslas” when I’d rather be the king. (I seem to be related to all three characters in that song.) But mostly it was some variation on the contemplation of the stark deep beauty of the world, mixing in a strange way with the tasks of cutting and splitting wood. As if, as I watched the sky, with my every movement, there was a movement of the heart.

Sunset, Friday, 12 February 2010

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

The cat with eyes closed in the rectangle of sun on the carpet sits in a window of its own making.

Sunset, Thursday, 11 February 2010

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

The other day I mentioned the California artist Lauren McMullen in connection with meditation and painting. Now that I’ve had a real chance to look through McMullen’s work, I feel I should add that whatever kind of meditation she does, it must work really well. I was drawn first to her collages, including one on “Dreams” and another, “Skully,” featuring a skull. They’re both beautifully layered, subtle and, like all the best work, endlessly absorbing.

I admit “Skully” made me laugh because my first thought was of Vin Scully, the (very) longtime voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

I’ll also admit that when I saw McMullen’s watercolors in thumbnail, they seemed sort of ‘light’, perhaps like something on the order of colored pencil sketches. When I viewed them large, I saw I’d been 100% wrong. They’re deep and dark and intensely brilliant at the same time. Her design sense and color instincts seem unerring. “Las Olas,” part painting, part graphic, should be adopted as an official poster for Costa Rica.

Sunset, Wednesday, 10 February 2010

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

(Noon today:)

Flurry-clouds shred south away from the departing storm and shroud the sun in frozen steam, sharp crystals swirl off the snowfields and white out the twisted winds, the woods bend, straighten, and bend again, behind rising and falling veils – the earth is breathing ice, racing through time.