I-70 Rearview Mirror Twilight Retrospective – Sunset, Friday, 18 March 2016

William Van Doren, I-70 REARVIEW MIRROR TWILIGHT RETROSPECTIVE. Sunset from Interstate 70, Frederick County, Md. Oil on canvas, 28 x 30.

Left of Frederick – Sunset, Sunday, 8 January 2012

William Van Doren, LEFT OF FREDERICK. Sunset from Frederick, Md. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Approaching Frederick, Maryland, from the east on Interstate 70.

Rainstorm in a Cat’s-Eye (Sunset, Saturday, 1 October 2011)

William Theodore Van Doren, RAINSTORM IN A CAT’S-EYE (Sunset from Route 15, Oatlands, Loudoun County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

One of those moments when it’s raining but it looks like skies will soon clear. (They didn’t!) I was on my way back from the Michael Douglas Jones exhibit UNION: The Courier Journals, 1861-1865, at the Delaplaine Center, Frederick, Md. The room is deceptively small; in terms of its imagination, depth, artistry, and implications for our nation’s history, the show is immense. A signal achievement.

Images of the Sunset

This all started – well, in a way the change really started the moment I began painting sunsets and sunrises over 14 years ago. From the beginning, there’s always been tension between two tendencies.

On one side there’s what you might call just keeping the appointment with the sunset – just doing it – being there and painting. Entailed in this are the many implications, meditative and metaphysical, of ‘following the sun’.

On the other side, there’s the goal of painting a certain kind of image – an aesthetic goal. In other words, making a damn good painting.

To paint the sunset every day – and for two years both sunrise and sunset – especially while earning a living doing something else – means the painting you make is the painting you get. There’s no time for do-overs or revisions or long processes of development or elaboration of any one image. Everything is alla prima – done in one go. They are whatever they are.

Of course, it’s not only a matter of time – there’s also the kind of sky that happens on a given day.

From the beginning, I was – I think necessarily and even productively – divided. Do you want it fast or do you want it good? It had to be fast or the whole project would break down. It had to be good or there would be little joy in continuing. These two aspects were always in play – in a sort of balance.

Adding this blog – starting in April – intensified the tension.

First, the added steps involved in posting, plus writing, meant more pressure on the available time. Now I needed not only to paint but to cut the painting out of its watercolor block (for example), tape it to a wall for shooting, clean brushes, wash hands to avoid clogging the Nikon with cadmium yellow, adjust lights, shoot, offload, save file, upload, write, and preferably do all of this before everyone in this part of the world had gone to bed – and in time for some dinner! (We have dinner late, so in summer these things collide.)

But second, communicating with you – you know who you are! – also has meant I’m more aware of the qualities of each image.

Until now, I resolved this tension by understanding that the value of the series resided both in the fact that I went out every day and painted the sky and in the way I painted it. If they weren’t of a certain quality, doing them every day wouldn’t mean much. Yet doing them every day imbued them with a sort of message about the passage of the days – a relationship with time.

So, I resolved the tension by not resolving it, because it can’t be completely resolved. I accepted both sides. But the balance can shift. And now I think it has.

At this point, from stage left, enters my brother Steve (a metallurgist by profession, developing materials for aerospace). Then, from stage right, in honor of Bastille Day, a Frenchman, Marcel Proust. More precisely, I’ll bring in one of his translators, Lydia Davis. They helped me see where this was going.

So, at our lunch in Frederick the other day, Steve said something to me that was very similar to the sort of thing people will say from time to time. He really liked the painting of a particular sunset (June 15th) – and then he added something like, “Not that I don’t like them all, but that one seems special.”

I knew what he meant because I often feel the same way. Every so often this everyday process yields something that is more remarkable, in and of itself, as an image.

I think I was ready to hear his comment: I felt I wanted to do more of those kinds of images.

Now, I should preface the following by stipulating that no one who has just finished reading their very first volume of Proust (Swann’s Way, from In Search of Lost Time) should be allowed (1) to comment on it in public, and especially and above all (2) to draw any sort of connection between it and their own work. It isn’t done, and should never be done.

In my defense, I will say that I read it very ... very ... slowly ... over a period of at least six months, almost exclusively on Sunday mornings. And you thought I didn’t go to church.

(I know a couple of people who could read it in one Sunday, but Gillian, Sarah, sorry, hate you both.)

Anyway, I’m not actually going to get into Proust, just the introduction by Lydia Davis, which I read after I finished the book, and which, like Steve’s remark, probably struck me because I was ready for it:

The wistful closing passage [of Swann’s Way] ... introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance, of beloved places and people, and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory, and finally our art. For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus ... the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.

I thought about how I’d often said that the sunset paintings completely submit to time but also suggest something beyond time. I realized (for the first time!?) that one way the sunsets deal with time is by holding back a piece of it.

I had written the following a few days ago, before I read Lydia Davis. I ended up not posting it because it didn’t feel right at that time. But now maybe it does:

When the sun sets, there’s the feeling of understanding where we are, precisely because the sun is leaving us – leaving us exactly – here. There’s got to be a natural desire to follow, to be as timeless as the sun, to stay with it as it dictates time, that Lucky Old Sun.

What I realize, thanks to Stephen L. Van Doren and M. Proust (together again for the first time) (don’t worry, Steve won’t mind that a bit), is that just bravely going forth and painting the sunset every day and occasionally getting a really strong image isn’t enough for me.

To find the timelessness inside time, I need to go for whatever art can get.

I know not every image will work, but ... we’ll see what happens.

Sunset, Sunday, 12 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

The best thing about yesterday’s visit to Frederick, after the lunch, was going to the Delaplaine Center for the Arts. What a place! Along with the beautiful Carroll Creek “linear park” and the trompe-l’oeil Community Bridge mural project, the Delaplaine makes you wonder how a town of 60,000 can possibly do so much. 

The Delaplaine was featuring its regional juried exhibit (closing on the 19th) and an exhibition, ‘Urban Landscapes’, by Stephen Hay. We only had time for the large regional exhibit, but I sensed, on the way out, that I had missed something by not going through the Hay show as well, and a visit to his site confirmed that for me.

In the juried show, I was struck by many things, including the works of Robert Stuart Cohen, who does mesmerizing semi-abstractions using repeated brocade-like patterns. His painting ‘The Yellow Box’ made a big impression on me, partly because the title added a third dimension to what might otherwise have been perceived as a (phenomenally complex) two-dimensional design – the ‘yellow box’ became for me like a marble sarcophagus or holy object, an ark.

But all four of us ultimately were glued to the works of Michael Douglas Jones of Damascus, Maryland – and I’m glad I have links I can give you, because they’re difficult to describe. Even when you first see them and think they’re collages of found objects – albeit rare ones from past centuries – they’re remarkable. As you keep looking and realize that Jones has created these objects or made them what they are – they become nothing short of amazing.

For me, the significance of the Delaplaine – this was my second or third visit – is the sense that it gives me of the Frederick art community as open and expansive. It somehow avoids the insularity or cliquishness you find in other places. Further, it’s not elitist, yet it avoids elitism without pandering or compromise. 

Another town of this size, this close to major cities (Frederick is in some ways a satellite of both Washington and Baltimore), could become drained of identity. A town in Virginia with a similar name, last time I checked had long suffered that fate (in relation to Washington). Residents sometimes call that place ‘Dead Fred.’ I can’t imagine people saying the same about the Fred in Maryland.

Birthday, Brothers, Baseball . . .

I’ve decided to depart from my norm and show a little home movie from my birthday lunch in Frederick. (Birthday is later ... think ‘Marseillaise’ ...)

The lunch, at Volt, was terrific. The restaurant surprised me with an ice cream that I thought had a suspicious resemblance to the Tower of Babel (how did they know I wrote a blog?) with candle. It was sort of vanilla but turned out to be flavored with orange mint.

I figure the candle was for the ‘1’ in ‘61’ and, from my p-o-v, the candle flame, sort of as in Roger Maris’s home run record, was an asterisk. (As in *Hey, not really ...)

Out in front of the restaurant, we did a little self-portrait: my sister-in-law Sandra Ashley Van Doren, my brother Steve, me, and my much better half, Laura Owen Sutherland.

Sandy and Steve are the greatest. Steve and I are 16 months apart and have always been essentially a team – I sometimes think that together we make a well-balanced personality. Individually, well ...

They gave me just what I’d asked for: Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, by Larry Tye. This of course is the story of Satchel Paige. Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox this year is the second-oldest player to make his first All-Star team, at age 42; Paige was the oldest, in 1952, at the age of 46, “after,” as MLB.com puts it, “years of dominance in the Negro Leagues.” (That’s one way to put it.)

Steve had not yet inscribed it, so I had a special request. When I was in Pony League (ages 13–15), the manager of the Lorton Fire Department team, Graham Davis, decided based on my Little League experience that I might make a good pitcher. He even got me a warmup jacket – flame red with a big gold ‘L’, which I got to keep (and kept for centuries), even though I never pitched in a game.

When Mr. Davis tried me out, at the Lorton Reformatory stadium, with its old wooden covered grandstands, well-tended grounds and my first real pitcher’s mound, I immediately got frustrated and started firing pitches all the way to the backstop. End of pitching career. (I was a notorious hothead. We once had to stop a sandlot game for 30 minutes to search the woods for my glove.)

I asked Steve if he would inscribe it, ‘Graham Davis should have given you another chance.’

This would have been nice, coming from Steve. Even though I did fine and ended up in center, Steve came along a couple years later, hit .521 and broke every record they had.

He inscribed my book: ‘Graham Davis had it right!’