Sunset, Sunday, 31 January 2010

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

Snow-covered, clear and calm (I’m sure about that part), and headed for 10°F (maybe).

There was a sort of Good King Wenceslas moment that came to me years ago, in another place. I was gathering cedarwood by moonlight, walking in a luminous field of frost, the moon a great frost mirror, so bright it blew all stars away except a few frozen points. A plane overhead, two prop engines, flashed one running light cherry frost, the other vanilla. I realized I felt warmed by the frost, that cold could be deceptive, and frost a flame.

Sunset, Wednesday, 20 January 2010

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

A cold rain at sunset.

The so-called Alley Field is a sloping area of some four or five acres of grass with a narrow lane at its entrance; the alley runs from a broken metal gate next to a small tangled dell of honey locust, blackberry and wild rose, then opens into the field.

Along one border, over the past couple of years, big oaks have been falling into the field – first one in a windstorm, then one after heavy rains, and another – and then yesterday I found a 60- to 70-foot red oak had simply heaved up out of its roots and crashed out onto the grass like a building in the street.

What’s funny – sort of – about these trees is that all of them have been very much alive. On yesterday’s oak I couldn’t even find the typical one big dead branch anywhere, and all the twigs were in bud and flexible. Yet a huge oak on the very same fenceline, a neighbor to all these collapsers, bleached dead for decades, which I’d cut 95% of the way through and then tried to help along to its fate by driving seven big iron wedges into the cut, refuses to fall, or budge, or even teeter just a little for me. No felling, no firewood. Kind of embarrassing.

Turns out the tree has a structure well known to timberers – and it’s the reason I originally didn’t just go ahead and cut through the remaining 5% of the trunk. It has two major upper portions of canopy, two massive uplifted limbs, almost perfectly balanced. So you can have no idea which way it’ll break – for example, on you.

Dangerous types of trees earn names from wood-cutters. A tree hung up on another is called a Widowmaker – a name that has effectively deterred me every time I’ve been tempted to mess with one. This other type of tree – the equally divided one – is called a Schoolmarm. Can’t make up its mind. Do you think these lumberjacks might have been just a little bit sexist?

Sunset, Saturday, 19 December 2009

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

About 20 inches of snow later, here we are. Interesting how the color of the snow changes in the depth of the storm, from all the fugitive tints I was talking about yesterday to a sort of deep silver.

Once again we had firewood chores, and I cut and then Laura and I carried wood through the drifts from a shed about 100 yards or so away. Before that, she took this shot of another of the landlord’s neglected sheds, near our front yard:

Laura Owen Sutherland

As we were going down to the other ‘barn’ to get the wood, we looked back at the house:

Laura Owen Sutherland

The strange glow – in the same direction as my sunset view – comes from the GE Fanuc facility about a mile away on Route 29.

Sunset, Sunday, 6 December 2009

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

With some snow on the ground, it’s finally turned fairly cold; all three cats stretched out near the wood stove (our only heat source) all day – Flint the foxhound keeping a respectful distance on the sofa. Since this site has been mentioning firewood-cutting almost every other day, I thought I’d show some of the results. This was the scene in December 2005, but there’s a remarkably similar-looking pile out on the porch right now.

William Theodore Van Doren. India ink and watercolor, 2005, approx. 8 x 10.

The quote from Thoreau was added when we used this sketch as a Christmas card.

(Inside, the card read “Warmth, Love, Cheer – Now and for the New Year.” The sketch is available as a print or a card at a new Imagekind gallery.)

Wherever you are, I hope you keep warm.

Sunset, Thursday, 3 December 2009

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

Sunset seemed to be happening on schedule, but I had one more woodcutting chore. Lucky for me, because things really started happening during the twilight portion of the program.

Yesterday and today tempted me with different ways to say early December feels a little out of focus. Shepherding Flint yesterday on a five-mile-or-so off-leash ‘walk’ (his part is more like a run, and longer), in the rain, I had foolishly just believed the forecast and wasn’t dressed for 39°, and the low dark clouds (and my numb hands and feet) belonged to midwinter. 

This afternoon I had the impression of the sky as a big watery blue bog of early spring.

But then the days aren’t out of focus except in these conceits. Early December shows us exactly what it is, and these are the days – the days we’re dealt.

Sunset, Wednesday, 2 December 2009

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

I’m sure there are plenty of other bloggers who have to fix a chainsaw in the pouring rain while composing an entry and watching the sunset in order to post a daily painting. We could form a professional association. The name doesn’t really matter, as long as it makes the acronym M E N T A L.

I’ve been catching up with an old friend who was a significant person in my life, and she wrote something I found quite striking. We were both once strict “laissez-faire libertarians,” part of a group that, at the time, would have objected to being labeled ‘conservative’. However, conservative is what we were, when you get down to it; some in our old cohort have even since slithered on over into that grotto called neoconservatism.

In any event, her comment was somehow the most accessible explanation I’ve seen for why a person would mature into a liberal.

I have moved way across the spectrum since the early days of knowing you and today would shamelessly describe myself as a tax-and-spend liberal. One of my biggest frustrations is with the reluctance of the American people to devote themselves and their money to creating a more robust community and to assuring a more satisfying life experience for others sharing the planet at the very same moment in time.

Simple humanity and common sense.