Sunset, Monday, 7 September 2009 (Labor Day)

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

Behind sunset, vast blue night and bright stars.

Part of the day was devoted to making peach ice cream, adapting a recipe from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook: A Consuming Passion, by IALW chef-owner Patrick O’Connell. Despite the Inn’s reputation for complex, almost theatrical dishes, the recipes in this book are really accessible. To make what may be the best peach ice cream you’ve ever had (I think the secret is the vanilla), just do the ice cream part of the three-part “Peach Intensifier” dessert, cutting it in half for a small home ice cream maker. Just don’t mix white and yellow peaches – I’m not sure white peaches will work at all, but I know from sad experience that they don’t work with yellow.

If you have peaches coming out of your ears and are in dire need of this recipe, just contact me and I’ll write it out for you. In our case, the ice cream–making was occasioned not by Aunt Millie’s Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, peaches, but by our very own Crozet, Virginia, peaches, which have been fantastic this year.

And if you’re thinking it’s trivial for me to go off on a tangent about cooking – what, in this blog, are you kidding? – this morning I happened to catch NPR’s On Point, and a segment with an author who says humans are the apes who ultimately mastered fire and learned to cook. (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.)

Now, let’s see about those unbelievably human Mark Bittman Brussels sprouts ...

Sunset, Sunday, 6 September 2009

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

I receive general reports about site traffic, and was wondering why yesterday’s post about the Poe story “The Fall of the House of Usher” had received an unusual number of ‘robot hits’. (These aren’t real site visits, just various search engines indexing your stuff ... something like that ...) Anyway, could it have been the mention of “I Am The Walrus”?

Then I noticed the most conspicuous word in the Poe story, and my phrase –

... the weird music Usher makes ...

Oh! ... that Usher ...

Moving along, and perhaps ahead, musically, my friend Agustín Gurza in L.A., longtime Latin music critic for the L.A. Times and now among the many proud ex-staffers of that once-great paper, recommends “Nueva Vida,” the new song from (quoting Agustín) “the brilliant Barcelona band Ojos de Brujo ... ‘Viene y va,’ says the swaying chorus. Life comes and goes. Very joyful.” Song/video here. Features the lead singer’s new baby.

I have never met, but am a fan of, one of Agustín’s friends, the great Rubén Blades, who has just released a new album, Cantares del Subdesarollo, which you can find on iTunes or on Rubén’s own site. What Blades has done thus far in his life is enough to make you dizzy. I would bet that, strangely, North Americans know him most from his part on the short-lived TV series Gideon’s Crossing, which barely gets a mention in his Wikipedia bio. The opening paragraphs of that article will give you a clue what kind of person we’re talking about here:

Rubén Blades Bellido de Luna (born July 16, 1948) is a Panamanian salsa singer, songwriter, lawyer, actor, Latin jazz musician, and politician, performing musically most often in the Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz genres. As songwriter, Blades brought the lyrical sophistication of Central American nueva canción and Cuban nueva trova as well as experimental tempos and political inspired Nuyorican salsa to his music, creating thinking persons' (salsa) dance music.

Blades has composed dozens of musical hits, the most famous of which is “Pedro Navaja,” a song about a neighborhood thug who appears to die during a robbery (his song “Sorpresas” continues the story), inspired by “Mack the Knife.” He also composed and sings what many Panamanians consider their second national anthem. The song is titled “Patria” (Fatherland). He is an icon in Panama and is much admired throughout Latin America, and managed to attract 18% of the vote in his failed attempt to win the Panamanian presidency in 1994. In September 2004, he was appointed minister of tourism by Panamanian president Martín Torrijos. He holds law degrees from the University of Panama and Harvard Law School.

This may just reflect how unhip I am on Blades’s music, but my favorite album of his is his collaboration with Willie Colón, Siembra (the all-time best-selling salsa record, so it’s a little like someone from Maracaibo saying “Oh, the Beatles? Sgt. Pepper, right?”). “Maria Lionza” from that album is one of my all-time favorite songs ... and I don’t even understand Spanish.

Sunset, Saturday, 5 September 2009

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

Not necessarily recommended: Reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” at midnight, by an open bedroom window, with a full moon, while coyotes start yipping madly just a mile away in the woods, like Shakespeare’s witches, and underneath those spectral sounds an owl begins calling, nearby, over and over, one of those with a long descending trill like a whippoorwill in reverse – and Lily, our 17-year-old blind cat, starts howling on the back porch.

It’s not even Halloween ...

In the story, I kept going back over a passage that made me think for a moment maybe Poe had anticipated hip hop, or at least the talking blues. Here the narrator speaks of the weird music Usher makes playing his guitar; I’ve added the italics:

... the fantastic character of his performances ... the fervid facility of his impromptus ... must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration ... observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement.

Then I thought – wait a minute. What about “I Am The Walrus”?

The author anticipated, in 1839, the nature of the very song in which he’s mentioned!

Man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe

I was going to say I hope bats don’t fly out of the sunset for you, but actually we get them here a lot at twilight and they’re good to have around. And I think they’d be nice to Edgar, too.

Sunset, Friday, 4 September 2009

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

Once upon a time, I was going to attempt a mini-essay on how all serious artists are alike in broad intent – why the similarities between a Jackson Pollock and a Jan van Eyck might be much more important than the differences. In this sparkling screed I would compare my friend Mike Fitts, a Pop Realist (I have no idea what he’s going to think of that label, which I just made up) with yours truly, a – what? (A whatever – possibly a would-be neo-Transcendentalist, and I have no idea if there’s any school of painting by that name.) But this will have to wait for another day, possibly the 30th of February.

Meanwhile, it’s more fun just to link you directly to some big versions of Mike’s paintings. Most if not all of these are done on found metal, scrap tin, the roofing of old burned-down sheds. (For example, roofs of old burned-down sheds accidentally burned down by a fellow artist.) (No name or initials, but he burned the shed down neotranscendentally.) You can choose from among a box of popcorn, an adjustable end wrench, a package of Twinkies, a Hostess cherry pie, a box of animal crackers (and directing you to all this food probably reflects my orientation more than Mike’s ... and I hope you’ve had something to eat!), an ice cream scoop, and, my favorite so far, a freshly laundered and folded white shirt.

Sunset, Thursday, 3 September 2009

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

Today I wrote out some of my thoughts on aesthetics. So naturally, tonight’s sunset (which I like) turns out to have almost nothing to do with the specifics I wrote about!

Oh well, treachery is the spice of life. I think Julius Caesar said that. Here’s part of what I wrote ... I keep cutting out the boring parts ... by which I mean the really, indisputably, time-tested boring parts ...

*      *      *      *

At some point (around 25 years ago) I started feeling compelled to paint ‘cracks’ in the sky. In “Trees Between Fields” (on the bio page), “fields” had an intentional double or triple meaning – fields of grass, fields of perception, fields of reality. 

It’s no revelation to say that in art everything is more than what it appears to be. For me, the sky seems especially suited to the role of expressing more than itself, because we already tend to see it that way in ordinary life. The sky’s like a screen where we project the events and feelings of each day and night. We’re also accustomed to looking at it as if we’re trying to see through a veil. To quote Sam Cooke, “I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.” If you tell someone, “Well, what’s up there beyond the sky is the exosphere,” you won’t be addressing the question. Beyond the sky, in so many cultures, is visual shorthand for beyond this life.

But when I started painting sunsets, and for each day, I did feel somewhat constrained from painting the way I would if I were just painting any sky. Painting each one, of course, encourages the sense of being almost a ‘painter of record’. A certain fidelity seems called for, so it didn’t make sense or seem right to turn a dull rainy night in October 1997 into a field of blazing gold and orange, if later I was going to say, “Here’s the sunset from the 17th of October, 1997” (or whatever).

There have been exceptions – every once in a while through the years I’ve experimented with different ways of departing from a sort of representational norm. And, since mid-July, I’ve approached these images more and more with my aesthetic, while still keeping a relationship to “the way it is” on a particular night.

The sunset sky can be both an opaque screen and a misty veil. The hybrid of these would be called, in the theater, a scrim. You can project light against it. You can see light behind it.

Sunset, Wednesday, 2 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.I realized about five minutes before sunset that I’d like to talk about what I’m looking for in doing these paintings – aside from the element of painting the sunset specifically – what I’m going for, for example, in painting a sky. I hope to get to that soon.

In connection with this, I started looking again at the work of my friend Mike Fitts – both online and in our living room, dining room and kitchen – and discovered that I’ve never placed him on my list of links at the side of the page. Bad mistake, but it’s there now. And you can find Mike here now. 

Another clear sky tonight, although with more haze on the horizon ... rather purple haze ... uh-oh, here we go again. ’Scuse me ... while I paint the sky.

At this rate:

Maybe somewhere down the road a ways
You’ll think of me and wonder where I am these days
Maybe somewhere down the road when someone plays
Purple Haze ...

(Apologies to Tom Petty and the Traveling Wilburys.)