Sunset, Tuesday, 29 September 2009

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

A little postscript to yesterday’s entry about persimmons can be found here.

Autumn light. The air was so clear, earlier today, trees on the nearby Southwest Mountains looked individually articulated with a leather punch. On approach they changed from a uniform blue-green to every variation of green and yellow-green, sharply defined cloud shadows passing quickly through the mountain hollows. Green is now that flat opaque shade of early fall – a dead green, perhaps, but no less welcome for that – autumn’s commemorative green, warm, persisting, in no big hurry to fade.

Sunset, Monday, 28 September 2009

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

Clear tonight, or nearly so.

On this >1,000-acre place we inhabit as renters there are, to our knowledge, four persimmon trees, and every year we watch as the fruit ripens and taunts us with our inability to make proper use of it.

If you were to look up persimmons online, and find them, say, on a cooking website, you’d think, hey, what’s the problem, there are plenty of ways to use persimmons!

But, ironically – even though our English word ‘persimmon’ originates with the Powhatan tribe of Virginia – what most people now mean when they discuss persimmons are two Asian varieties, and these are the kind you can find in supermarkets.

In fact, ‘fresh grocer’ Tony Tantillo cautions you to be aware that there is not one, there are TWO (as if there were just two) varieties of persimmon: 

... the Fuyu, the kind you can eat right away, and the Hachiya, the kind you can’t. If you bite into an unripe Hachiya persimmon, it is as if you just drank six cups of extra strength tea. This astringent flavor is due to the high level of tannin in the fruit, and there is a good chance that you would never try a persimmon again because it tastes so bitter.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but even the Hachiya is a sweetie pie compared with the persimmons that gave persimmons their name – persimmons with virginiana in their Latin title. And these guys, these eastern, country, American persimmons, are tough to deal with.

Let’s put it this way. I’ve long been aware that you were supposed to let our persimmons go past the frost. They start out green and hard, then ripen to orange, softening, and then, after a hard frost, they turn a bit darker, even somewhat blue in places, and very soft – and then you’re supposed to be able to eat them.

I don’t think so!

‘Astringent’ doesn’t do them justice. Ever seen those joke photos of some old guy, seemingly with no teeth, his lips and mouth and cheeks so puckered up it looks like he’s swallowed them? That’s what it feels like.

I’ve tried various ways of using them, including a really interesting recipe in one of my favorite ‘old’ (1970s-era) books, still available, Putting It Up With Honey: A Natural Foods Canning and Preserving Cookbook, by Susan Geiskopf ... Geiskopf was in California when she wrote the book and I think that recipe needs one of the Asian varieties.

As for virginiana, I figured the thing to do might be to add sugar or honey and strong spices and try to make a sort of chutney. I gave up on my last attempt, before Thanksgiving, partly because of flavor failures and partly because of the two huge flat seeds that take up so much of each persimmon.

Precisely because of those unmistakable seeds, I can report one discovery I made out in the fields today. Even though persimmons are coming along rather late, and aren’t yet even entirely orange, much less soft, bears – who must possess mouths of steel (and iron constitutions) – seem to have no problem with them whatsoever.

Sunset, Sunday, 27 September 2009

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

Today I caught part of the new Ken Burns series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea – I think we cable-less, Tivo-less people will want to rent this and make sure we get the whole thing.

I was struck by the following rhetorical question – or poetical question – from John Muir:

Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?

Sunset, Friday, 25 September 2009

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

All day it’s been gray here – damp and drab. As it became apparent it was going to stay that way, I started almost to obsess about rebelling against the overcast and perhaps painting ‘blue clouds’. I had ‘blue clouds’ on the brain as I surveyed the horizon one more time and started to paint.

But what one has in mind and what comes out of the brush – out of real impulse rather than a mere idea – are often two very different things. I didn’t really get the radically blue clouds I had pictured and in fact started, after a layer of white, with sepia – a brown – almost everywhere. And then a gray made mostly from ultramarine blue, yellow ochre and the Gamblin mixture called brown-pink. And so on – not so much blue and not a departure, despite my ferment.

The ‘blue’ impulse did raise the issue of how much of an angle I might decide to take from any given night’s sky. Normally this wouldn’t matter at all and I wouldn’t even be talking about it except for a certain responsibility I feel, in painting this particular series, to be something of a painter of record. My hope was that if I did in fact paint solid blue clouds, they would somehow also work as an analog for the ‘pictorial’ sky. So that if September 25th were important to you and you wanted a print of the sunset, there would be a relationship between the image and the evening that not only I would see but you might recognize as well. I don’t know that this connection is absolutely necessary, but that’s my thought at the moment.

The question is no longer entirely academic, because I’ve just started to make reproductions of the daily sunsets available (here). The prints in this particular gallery are around 11 x 14 – I can’t make them larger at this point because of camera issues – but with a mat and frame I hope they work for many situations. As soon as I can, I’ll be offering larger prints and posters.

Sunset, Thursday, 24 September 2009

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

It’s been steamy today, and my attention turns, down in front of my view of the sunset, to the huge circular garden in the back yard, which, as I’ve previously explained, has been neglected and left dormant this year – which actually means, going crazy with weeds this year. But not just your ordinary waist- and shoulder-high weeds – I mean jungle-like weeds – violacious weeds. (I love that word – encountered while proofing a medical journal, where it described a skin eruption. Scared me to death.) Pokeweed, of course – spectacular, almost tree-like pokeweed some nine feet tall, now a gorgeous toxic bright purple from stern to stems, hanging with the dark purple berries we painted our faces with as kids. Thistles. Yet another volunteer peach tree. New blackberry hedges. But the most prominent invader – literally an invasive species – ailanthus trees, three of them, at least 15 feet high. How something so widely despised would be called Tree of Heaven escapes me; around here it’s commonly known as Paradise Tree.

The southeast Asian origins of the ailanthus suit the day, and its jungle leaves make me think of the paintings of Henri Rousseau – yes, the one they called ‘Le Douanier’. What a beautiful painter. Alongside my setting sun (although mine is overtaken by nearby storms), Henri adds a lustrous silver moon. At the center of the garden, perhaps a savage nude with lionesses. The garden chokes with tropical vegetation. The Blue Ridge reverts to its ancient volcanic past and issues plumes of smoke.

Sunset, Wednesday, 23 September 2009

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

The sun came out today and pretty much set everything straight, as we’d always suspected it could. For one of the first times this year, late morning and early afternoon saw the high blue sky and pure white clouds of midsummer. The Mexican guys cut the fields again, this time without having to inadvertently run over any rabbits, turtles or snakes. Myanmar was restored as Burma, and the people of Honduras got their president back. Antonin Scalia revealed all the secrets Dick Cheney had told him over shotguns. John and George came back to tour in support of the remastered box set. My parents called, as I expect yours did as well. The sun set, and every heart was at peace.