Sunset, Sunday, 7 February 2010

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

(This morning:)

Pine boughs weighted fresh in snow, a wall of boughs a thousandfold sunrise.

Sunset, Saturday, 6 February 2010

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

The sun broke through for a couple of moments before sunset, and the snow ended. We had sleet all last evening and so did not quite get the full Middle Atlantic Snow Event – a mere 16 inches here.

Clouds came back for sunset but the ceiling had lifted enough to show a little bit o’ Blue Ridge.

Often in painting snow sunsets like Tuesday’s and these last three nights, it’s a question of looking at what seems to be a gray-white sky and waiting for the undertone or after-image color to suggest itself. Or I’ll begin the painting on a seemingly perverse impulse – as on Thursday, lay down a thin mix of cadmium red, rose madder, azo orange and cadmium yellow, with the thought, “Let’s see how we get out of this one ...”

Sunset, Thursday, 4 February 2010

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

Thanks to Ethel Cole for the word of the day (at least).

“So,” Ethel says to me, “are you ready for the snowpocalypse?” 

If you saw how revved-up folks in this area get over a predicted big storm – if you spent five minutes in a grocery store on a day like today – you’d know how truly perfect Ethel’s word is. 

Of course, this one may really be snowpocalyptic. And yes, Ethel, I believe this time we are ready. I hope this time I won’t be telling sad tales of having to walk four miles up a major highway for supplies.

The sun was a whitish moon-like blur in a gradually lowering sky, approaching sunset. 

Meanwhile, and speaking of wintry sunsets, NPR reported the following today on Morning Edition. I don’t quite understand where the webcam was located, from this story, but here’s the whole thing:

A man lost on the ice of Germany’s North Sea was saved by two cameras and a keen-eyed woman hundreds of miles away. The man had trekked onto pack ice to take photos of [the] sunset. He became disoriented and couldn’t find the shore, so he signaled for help by flashing his camera. The woman who spotted him was taking in that same sunset on a webcam from the comfort of her home. She alerted police near where he was and they guided him to safety.

Evidently, we sunset watchers also watch out for each other.

Sunset, Wednesday, 3 February 2010

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

Today God, whoever or whatever that may be, looked out at the world through one deep sapphire blue eye in the clearing clouds above the snowy woods, and one clear topaz brown eye in the pooling river, and I sensed the power in that arc of vision encompass and inform everything that exists, from me and Flint to the dead wood on the trail to the steel and rubber in the hunters’ tree stand.

Sunset, Tuesday, 2 February 2010

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

Snowing at sunset (and for the past couple of hours), 33°.

Given what I have to report, it’s just as well that with snow blanking out the Blue Ridge, I’m featuring the woods in the foreground. I’ve written about these woods before, especially in the final entry on “Looking at the Sunset,” concerning how they’ve come to affect the view. I said I’d been surprised by how much the woods, as an aggregate, had grown in the 15 years I’d been painting the sunset beyond them, and I basically implied, in so many words, that I must’ve been kinda dumb not to realize that they would.

What I said, exactly, was

I guess I always just thought the woods were what they were – the woods, mature, pretty much unchanging. But “the woods” must be jumping up quite a bit every year. Who knew? 

But now comes word, in yesterday’s New York Times, that woods in the eastern U.S. have been responding to climate change by growing two to four times faster than normal. Although they apparently can’t keep this up indefinitely, for now they’re consuming some of the excess carbon dioxide. However much snow we may be getting in this brief season, and regardless of what the groundhog may have to say, it seems appropriate to welcome you to the greenhouse.

Sunset, Monday, 1 February 2010

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

Sunset: Color as a marker for time.

All the January sunsets can be seen at a glance, here.