Sunset, Monday, 17 August 2009

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

I heard tonight from a visitor to this site from Slovakia. Despite my father’s Dutch name, from van Doorn, from ancestors who started farming in what is now Brooklyn in 1630, I’m half Slovak, as far as I know, through my mother, whose parents came here from Czechoslovakia more than 250 years later.

I sketched a rock in the dirt road, about a quarter mile to the right of this vantage point; I sketched the sun in clouds at about six o’clock from the same place. It’s one those scratchy-hot uncomfortable dog days, of which we’ve actually had few this year. (I perhaps should note that we don’t have A/C.) I wanted to think of the clouds as cool blue rock and not boiling gray steam; I wondered how much the rock, the clouds, the sun and I might have in common – and other thoughts of a mild delirium.