‘Sinister Kid’ Sunset, Wednesday, 4 August 2010

William Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

This was one of the craziest sunsets I can remember. Fifteen minutes earlier we were drowning in a violent thunderstorm and heavy downpours. Just at sunset, with rain and lightning still happening here in the foreground, the horizon lifted. I had a difficult time believing it, much less facing how to handle it.

I needed music. The I-Ching (iPod) was obliging, starting me with Van Morrison’s “Tore Down à la Rimbaud,” which pretty much describes my psychological starting point. Next, “Smoky Places” by The Corsairs – exactly. By the time I was finishing and signing, “Sinister Kid” by The Black Keys was somehow really the signature for the piece, not in a literal way, but better, in the energy.

Then, while wrapping up, it was nice to have Clarence Carter, “Slip Away” ...

Sunset, Thursday, 6 August 2009

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

So I’m chopping some really potent onions from Integral Yoga, and this doesn’t usually happen but tears are flooding down my face, the sunset (meaning the image I will want to paint) is happening unexpectedly early and is one of the strongest sunsets it seems like we’ve had in weeks, and the iPod has decided to throw down one of Don McLean’s major I’m-killing-you-softly ballads (“Crossroads,” as it happens), but I’m actually laughing because the tears have nothing to do with the beautiful sunset, or the song, or even with the following:

Oh, I’m scared of the middle place
Between light and nowhere.

                        “Hope There’s Someone” – Antony & The Johnsons

The sun goin’ down, boy
Dark gon’ catch me here.

                        “Cross Road Blues” (Take 2) – Robert Johnson

Sunset, Tuesday, 28 July 2009

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

In Which iPod Exposes Music Theft

No, not illegal downloads – songwriters stealing from each other. I’ll say at the outset I think the song that contains the arguably stolen material is probably even better, overall, than its model.

(Which I think is pretty unusual. For example, was Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” really worth rummaging through Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto?) (That’s O.K., Eric, we’ll always have The Raspberries.)

So, anyway, you know of course how iPod shuffle can get spooky – supposedly random orders producing weirdly synchronous sequences. And sometimes if you have a live track from a CD, at the end of that track you may hear the intro to the next song on the disk – but of course, because you’re on shuffle, that is almost never the next song you’ll hear from the iPod.

So I’m editing client work today, and playing music because the work is fairly low-intensity and it’s after lunch and I’m trying to keep from crashing face-first onto the desk. The song playing is from Concert For George – “That’s The Way It Goes,” done by Joe Brown. Song ends and after much applause for Brown’s fine performance, Eric Clapton announces, “TOM PETTY ... and THE HEARTBREAKERS!”

O.K., place goes slightly ape, but – that’s the end of that track.

To my confusion and surprise, the next song is – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers – except I knew (in the very first instants) that not only was this song not on Concert For George, I did not even have this song.

Then I realized – of course! It’s not “American Girl” – this is the other song with this intro and rhythm track! –  “Last Nite” by The Strokes.

(I realize that not just one but possibly both of these songs will seem ancient to some people. Oh, well. To put things in perspective, today I also heard “Lonely Blue Boy” by Conway Twitty ... and remembered when it came out.)

In Which Bill Saves the Planet ... Slightly

I was leaving the produce section of the grocery store today with a two-pound container of Michigan blueberries, on sale, when I suddenly realized – Wait a minute, I’m supposed to go looking for wild blackberries today!

Back go the trucked-in or flown-in Michigan blueberries, and, later, out into the briar patches go I. WHAT a hero. Off the grid!

In Which Bill Wakes Up ... At Least for a Moment

So I’m walking down the fields toward blackberries, and you know how it is some days, your mind is more or less filled with a whole lot of things you’re working on, many of which are a long long way from working out right, and there’s just a sort of jammed-up, cloudy mix of things, large and small, to think about. Well, maybe you don’t know how that is, but that’s how it sometimes is for me. And it’s a hot, steamy, not very comfortable summer day, I guess you could call it a very average Virginia summer day, more than half cloudy, the sun beating down through three or four shifting layers of thin white and dull blue and soft gray and – just not what you call a stellar, striking sort of day.

And then I stop, or actually I keep walking but I do a sort of tight but goofy-stumbly 360 while I’m walking down the field. And I realize, Man, are you crazy? Look at this! I’m walking outside at four in the afternoon, in a huge green bowl of grasses, the sky’s enormous, everywhere there are gallant stands of oak, there’s the spring and the pear tree, big hot steel blue clouds in the west ... Look at this. This is IT.

Twilight, Saturday, 27 June 2009

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

This was only 15 or so minutes after the sunset.

Change happens.

I decided ‘twilight’ was a better description than ‘15 or so minutes after sunset’. Then, as I was painting, the iChing (iPod on shuffle) threw out Antony & The Johnsons, “Twilight.”

I have yet to hear anything by Antony that I haven’t liked. I would say he’s the marriage (?) of Boy George and Roy Orbison, except that fails to do justice, if not to his talent, to something that he expresses. I first encountered him through his soul-shaking performance of “If It Be Your Will” on Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man. Several of the performances on that soundtrack, while perfectly fine in the context of the film, grow precious on further listening – but not that one. Rufus Wainwright is another notable exception.

Shooting this linen canvas – the photo setup involved – gave me a chance to add a sunset that I really like, involving the Lincoln Memorial, from January 5th.

I’ve also added a new entry – “Looking at the Sunset (Part 5)” – a sketch that I originally thought was bad. In fact, I only ran across it again because I’d sketched this crazy twilight on the back of the same sheet! 

My reversal of opinion about my own sketch – I actually like it a great deal – illustrates something I told my students (Willa, Mohan, and Lakshmi) about a dozen times each, when they’d be discouraged or dismayed by something they’d tried to do – and it’s something that I told them (every time) I have trouble learning myself. Especially in visual art, the quality of what you do can’t be judged by your own immediate emotional reaction. Save your work – save your sketches! If nothing else, days, weeks or years later when you encounter them again, they’ll bring back some part of your life to you.

You may also be surprised how much more promising they seem than they did on the day you were caught up in judging yourself.