;)
Sunset, Monday, 5 October 2009
;)
William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.
Tonight was almost about as clear as it gets (that’s exactly how I wanted to say it) – no pattern discernible anywhere, an even gradation from bright rose gold through an undifferentiated blue.
The predominant oaks around here go pretty directly to brown, or, if we’re lucky, a sort of rust – russet rust. But today in the old cut-over fields by the Rivanna it seemed the leaves of the little blackjack oaks were still partly green, and also blotched red, yellow, gold, orange, all at once, in patterns of color so delicately balanced they were like paintings. A painting can almost suspend your vision, often you don’t focus on just one thing, the whole piece holds your attention in a sort of trance – like a hypnotic screen you see through to something much greater than just the image that seems to be there. A van Eyck can do that for me, a Cézanne always does, just as a Jackson Pollock can, the style or era doesn’t matter.
As for the little delta-shaped blackjack leaves, I’m not sure their patterns are really quite like paintings, or if I just see paintings they suggest. Probably the latter. If the leaves themselves were the paintings, I wouldn’t feel any need to make a painting of them. I stuck a leaf in my pocket and brought it home.
Monday, October 5, 2009 at 05:03PM | by BVD | in Sunset Paintings | tagged Blue Ridge, aesthetics, trees | Share Article | Comments Off 
;)
;)
;)
;)
Sunset, Wednesday, 7 October 2009
I happen to be very fond of vacant lots. Today I walked across this county’s mother of all vacant lot regions, the semi-developed territories on the perimeter of the so-called Hollymead Town Center, an interesting name for a shopping center where there is neither a town nor anything resembling a center. The sprawling mess, in the inimitable signature style of its developer, appears to have been not so much designed as randomly bulldozed.
So maybe I should clarify by saying that while I hate the process that creates vacant lots, I love the places themselves. At the center's northern limit, as I was about to enter this unnatural park, I stopped to sketch a beautiful old pear tree (real pear, not a decorative barren Bradford). Then I was amazed, as many times as I’ve driven into the place, to scale the eroded gravel banks along the northern entrance and find, largely hidden from the view of cars, acres of unfinished foundations and cement walls, gravel, weeds, straw strewn (a bit late) to slow the growth of gullies, overgrown backhoe attachments, lonely turquoise-painted utility connection pipes, a fuel tank, a dumpster, that lovely webbed orange plastic fencing and, scattered everywhere like enemy bunkers dislodged out of the ground by heavy bombardment, storm drains ready to be installed RIGHT NOW in front of YOUR store or office. Or maybe you have some heavy equipment capable of hoisting them into your half-ton pickup (might fit) and plopping them into your front yard, where you could enjoy having your very own storm drain complete with iron manhole cover. No hurry, they’ve got plenty.
Anyway, as negative as I may sound about these landscapes, in a strange way I love them all. As long as a vacant lot remains a vacant lot, to me it’s a wild place. It almost seems wilder than a preserve, because of the sense that it’s holding off a process of loss – it’s winning, for the moment. There’s a sense of intermission, of remission, of stillness and calm made greater by the agitation that presses against it. Anything can happen. And because of the way we live, and the way we drive around, and almost never go on foot in certain places, when you walk in some of these lands you may legitimately feel as though you’re its true discoverer and explorer. For me, I think this tends to fulfill the naive notion I had as a child that I was the first person ever to see a certain wonderful tree in the woods, or beautiful cascade on the local stream – certainly I wasn’t, but I might be the first person crazy enough to walk along the top of a certain ridge of excavated dirt.
The pear tree stands at the corner of a field of wild brown grasses and weeds, bordered by a strip mall, a ‘self-storage’ facility, a bank, an auto repair shop, and a quasi-colonial brick building that was once an independent grocery, then a Salvation Army Thrift Store, and is now for sale. The tree, the field, and some woods beyond, are probably all doomed. But as long as they live, they live forever.