Breezing Up (Sunset, Sunday, 5 December 2010)

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

Title stolen, of course, from Winslow Homer.

Sunset, Wednesday, 19 August 2009

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

In the vast museum gallery of the woods, walking with Flint, the sun through cloud cover skylight, I see art in reverse – Courbets and Corots, Constables, Sisleys, Homers and Sargents before they became these things. They started here, somehow. Even the most visionary Cézannes, the O’Keeffes, Dalis, Kandinskys, Rothkos, Warhols, Hockneys: What a room ...

Flint stops to drink from a stream, in the museum cafeteria.