Sunset, Tuesday, 5 January 2010

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

The Onion ran a great item on a guy who writes in a Moleskine notebook so as to avoid the pedestrian experience of having to write in a cheapo pad from CVS. (“Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook.”) Especially funny to me because I do exactly both – I love my Moleskine notebook, which I use for combined sketches and notes (as seen, for example, here and here), but can’t function without my CVS Chunky Pad, which I write on every day. (Sadly, CVS now calls this product something else much more generic, but I’m sticking with ‘Chunky Pad’.) I’m sure to post a sketch someday in “Bic Velocity Ballpoint on CVS Chunky Pad.” Not archival, but you won’t be able to tell the difference.

To complicate matters, this entire entry began as a test of my theory about another notebook, the one I use most often. It’s made in Japan by Apica (here’s a plug for where I got mine). My theory: the Apica’s paper is so amazingly smooth, and effortless to write on, even though I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, this post would just start writing itself, automatically. Which it did!

Apparently writing pads, left to their own devices, like to write about other writing pads.

Sunset, Monday, 4 January 2010

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

Today’s projects included an apple, a lemon, and a sort of seascape. Here’s the apple:

William Theodore Van Doren. Ashley’s Apple, 2010. Oil on paper, 6 x 9.

Sunset, Sunday, 3 January 2010

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

A cold sunset, in the mid-twenties, after 24 hours cold enough, and windy enough, to have needed water dripping in every part of the house to prevent frozen pipes.

Sunset, Friday, 1 January 2010

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

I’ve tried to describe, a few times now, how often I have to move all around the place here to really see the sunset, and then basically put together a composite of several views. Lately I ran into someone’s account of almost exactly the same process, and, quelle surprise, this guy Proust tells it pretty well.

Only his problem isn’t steadily growing woods in the foreground, he’s traveling by train, and at dawn he “glimpsed, in the windowpane, above a little black copse, serrated clouds of downy softness in a shade of immutable pink.”

“Soon,” he says, “great reserves of light built up behind [the pink]. They brightened further, spreading a blush across the sky; and I stared at it through the glass, straining to see it better, as the color of it seemed to be privy to the profoundest secrets of nature.”

Ah, but then the train changes directions –

and I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, till I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.

Sunset, Wednesday, 30 December 2009

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

Sunset, Tuesday, 29 December 2009

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

There’s a winter landscape right between a freeze and a thaw, and you may interpret it differently depending on which direction it’s taking. Some ground shows, in places even almost dry, there’s a beaten-back green inside the dead-straw matted grass – while entire fields remain solidly white. The sky approaching sunset doesn’t tip off any colors or show any clouds. We might have a solemn sinking of the sun and a falling thermometer, and no reassuring music to go along with it. Then at the last minute, even though it is indeed turning cold, we hear a little tune for a winter sunset.