Southwest Mountains from Burnt Mill Road (Afternoon, 1 July 2011)

William Theodore Van Doren, SOUTHWEST MOUNTAINS FROM BURNT MILL ROAD. Oil on wood panel, 11 x 14.

I’ve just launched a new gallery called “New and Recent” – starting with this painting from yesterday. It’s going for $75 and at 11x14 fits a standard frame.

Sunrise, Monday, 18 January 2010

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

Route 20, Stony Point to Barboursville, 9 a.m.

The Southwest Mountains, the low mountains, the Southwest Mountains here more brown than blue without benefit of distance, with the brown-violet woods of winter, the soft rounded summits barely distinguished one from another, a comforting line of friends along my right shoulder, like the song my father used to sing, “There’s a rainbow ’round my shoulder” – the Southwest Mountains, a rainbow ’round my shoulder.

Sunset, Tuesday, 11 August 2009

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

Oscar Wilde:

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.

Upon the other hand, they go on. 

Sunset, Monday, 10 August 2009

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

Tonight we’re making panzanella, with a recipe very freely adapted from Saveur Cooks Authentic Italian. Since we don’t have a garden this year – we usually have at least 30 tomato plants – we broke down and bought a flat of tomatoes from Planet Earth Diversified. We’re using baguettes from Albemarle Baking Company and – hey, what’s this, has product placement come to the Daily Sun Times?

No, just enthusiasm. Saveur was once a truly great magazine, before they changed editors a few years back, and if you ever had a baguette from Albemarle Baking, you also might gratuitously advertise its virtues.

As for Planet Earth Diversified, they’ve been pioneers, in this region, in the growing and distribution of ‘local’ food. Not only that – their delivery truck runs, not on regular gasoline, and not on corn or soy or some other agricultural product that could otherwise feed someone, but on used fryer oil.

Sunset, Sunday, 9 August 2009

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

Following Thoreau, in Walden, I might compare the Blue Ridge to a sort of universal music.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

That’s the sweet sort of sound I’d noticed, as a child, when we stayed up on the side of Fox Mountain – a filtered music rising from the valley floor and off the opposite massive wall of Pasture Fence Mountain. Now, each night, all sounds between here and the mountains, from Fox Mountain and Pigeon Top to the hum of U.S. 29 a mile away to the birds in the nearby woods, merge into one twilight tone.

L’heure bleue, the Blue Ridge, a blue note.

Sunset, Saturday, 8 August 2009

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

Clouds apparently aren’t approaching storms but steam rising off an oncoming heat wave. Peeps just west have been sending stifled, gasping distress signals like the last telegraph transmissions from front-line outposts just as they’re overrun by an overwhelming enemy force.

Meanwhile, much farther west, in southern California, a woman named Regina Jones is writing ... and writing ... with a book due soon ... and with no idea how beautifully and naturally she writes. Regina once gave me a critical opportunity to write, and to interview some of the greatest people in the music industry.

Among the things I owe you, girl (if I may), is the truth. Let me tell you something.

YOU

HAVE

GOT

‘IT’