Sunset, Tuesday, 24 November 2009

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

Depth perception: As previously mentioned, this painter’s is not the best. No need for alarm – my misperceptions were all at a distance of over 70 yards and didn’t involve the traffic I was in – but out on the road today trees and houses exchanged places, distant trucks were in front of, no, they were beyond traffic lights, brake lights were behind a fence, until it turned out they weren’t.

A question is, which came first, the feeling that all things are one, or the visual impression? I have an answer – and it involves more detailed autobiography than anybody really wants to know. But I’d like to think the most acute vision could be consistent with my universalist fuzztone.

On an unexpectedly related note, painting isn’t the easiest just after throwing ten-foot lengths of black walnut out of a shed, running a chain saw, splitting the rounds, and stacking the wood. Call me a 170-pound weakling – my arms are a little shaky. But maybe disability, if we can call it that, offers aesthetic opportunity. Not that these things have to be mutually exclusive, but perhaps any degree of inability to be precisely ‘objectively accurate’ encourages one to try to be honest instead.

Sunset, Monday, 23 November 2009

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

Today, in the rain, I caught myself looking appraisingly at certain long-dead trees hung up and leaning in the woods – trees that could be, at first glance, either a cedar or a pine. That’s because pine is almost always useless for burning in a wood stove, and cedar (in my opinion, not shared by everyone) is fantastic. It was kind of a silly exercise because this was a place where I can’t go wood-cutting, but I think it was a reflex left over from a winter fifteen years ago.

Back then I was renting a circa 1845 farmhouse off Scuffletown Road in Orange County, Virginia, more than a mile from my nearest neighbor, and heating almost exclusively with an old wood stove and wood I was cutting myself. Along one of the fencelines, for about a quarter-mile at the border between a big field and the woods, at least two dozen very large cedars had been blown down, or pushed over, years before, perhaps decades before. All had fallen back into the woods and were completely dry, bleached white-gray like huge wrecks of driftwood. The wood inside was deep red. Heartwood.

I ended up using every last one of the fallen trees, and they were just enough to get me through. For me this was a year of reflection and restoration, and the fragrant burning cedar seemed to ‘smudge’ not just my house but me. I marveled how it burned so cleanly, with almost no ash. This was the period immediately before I began the sunset paintings. Anything I do today I owe in part to the Cedars of Scuffletown.