William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.
I expect we all have missing or unfinished ‘works’, in whatever medium – painting, music, writing, home renovation, business, housework, cooking ... Hey, I just realized those weren’t just hypothetical examples, I qualify for all of them! Sad ...
Anyway, the Missing Works are usually the greatest, of course, since they live only in imagination and have never been made physically real. Today started with one: a painting of the sunrise. I also ‘saw’ two paintings of the mid-morning sky, but there was time only for the sunset, now that the clouds have come and we’re getting pelted with sleet.
The sunrise had a bright green sky close to the horizon on the right, or toward the south, just a bit of open sky above the low dark humped backs of the nearby Southwest Mountains. Toward the center and left clouds reaching up over the mountains were flame colors with slight ‘imperfections’ of dark, dull or whitish streaks that only made the colors seem more intense – burnished gold, golden rose, and a shade I’m not sure has a name but a gold-rose-magenta, all of which, in the painting, might have started as different combinations of Rose Madder Lake and Naples Yellow but then other colors would have needed to come in, brighter yellows, whites, crimsons, until the strange alchemy might be complete. And since this work is missing, I can assure you it was quite complete.
Above this horizon, higher clouds were veils of violet dust screening a sky of several interpenetrated blue pigments that, though still subdued and dark, burst out something like a deep drumbeat of the morning, just beginning. And since this is a missing work, I can assert that the sound could actually be heard in the painting.
;)
;)
William Theodore Van Doren, INDIANA DAWN (Sunrise from Corydon, Harrison County, Ind.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.As seen from the third floor of a Holiday Inn Express.
Monday, October 10, 2011 at 01:51PM | by 
;)
;)