Rain/Earth (Sunset, Saturday, 14 May 2011)

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

Blackberry Influenced (Sunset, Friday, 13 May 2011)

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

Doesn’t seem chilly enough to qualify as “blackberry winter,” but the blossoms are out, and we have days that stay gray and temperatures that don't rise.

Sunset, Sunday, 5 July 2009

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

Longtime readers – i.e., anyone who’s been around since we started in April – will know that we looked out for, and never found, blackberry winter, but did have a spell of huckleberry autumn and then a winter of the wild rose. Today, with the daytime temperature settling at 63°F, we had what we might call Winter at Wimbledon.

Barbecuing would have been good to do, just to warm up.

Sunset, Thursday, 4 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.58°F at 8:30 p.m.

Honeysuckle winter might be that little period in the first week of June when an improvident painter who heats his house exclusively with a woodstove finds himself operating a chain saw in heavy rain while watching a socked-in sunset.

Tonight behind the grays I used asphaltum, transparent earth yellow, sepia and brown-pink, along with radiant violet. So, if it looks like there’s no earth in this painting ... that’s not entirely true.

Sunset, Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.For the first time in my blogging life I’ll be traveling, tomorrow through Saturday, and decided that, at least for this first trip, hauling everything – easel, paint, palette, rags, dropcloth AND camera, tripod, lights, etc., etc. – and painting, shooting and posting from a hotel room and somehow doing this without putting unsolicited clouds and sunlight on the nice wallpaper – is probably a bit much. So I will be writing here – albeit somewhat more erratically, as we’re also celebrating Laura’s birthday – and, if possible, posting whatever photos of sketches or other artifacts of the trip I can rustle up to stand in for the paintings until they finally go up on Sunday the 31st. Look for sunsets from [name withheld because Laura doesn’t know].

Depending on where you live, calling a dip in the temperature from the 80s to the upper 50s a touch of  ‘winter’ may seem laughable, but, as you may know, I’ve been on the lookout for something we might call blackberry winter. We have something like it, even if it’s only been since around noon and it’ll probably be gone tomorrow. When the rain and wind blow through the windows you’d been opening for relief from the heat and you feel like starting a little fire in the woodstove, that’s good enough for me.

But I was noticing yesterday, when I was out with Flint, that half of the blackberry blossoms have fallen off and given way to the developing green berries. I need to come up with whatever blooms right after. So I give you the false winter of the wild rose.

Sunset, Monday, 11 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.If you paint sunsets, and I guess particularly if you paint a lot of them – O.K., I mean, especially if you paint every single last one of them and need to clean your brushes and scrub your hands before you can even touch the camera and begin the process of posting – there is often a temptation to cheat just a little, as in, “Oh, c’mon, the sky’s obviously not going to change in the next 15 minutes, maybe I can paint now and not wait ... ” 

And it seems that at least every other night for the last couple of weeks, if I had done that, I would have missed some completely unexpected phenomenon that didn’t even appear possible until the very last moment – determined gray skies, usually, that decided to burn themselves in a bright flame before they left.

Tonight, again, I thought the same thing – a cloud cover had come along and I thought, “What you see is what you’re gonna get.”

Wrong again! – except this time, the change was in the opposite direction. Out of the moderate cover came an arc of cloud that made me go check and see if “wall of doom” was in the forecast.

Instead of a predicted wall of doom, we had “a slight chance of showers.” Radar did show a wall of something, and I turned the usual view a little farther north to get more of it.

*    *    *    *

The high temperature dropped 20 degrees today, and when I was out with Flint I saw the blackberry blossoms were about halfway out. I was tempted to call today blackberry winter, but I’m going to hold out for a longer, more dramatic cool snap, a true ‘spell’ of weather, preferably when most of the blossoms are out.

The wild blueberries are all in bloom, though, so I’ll designate today a touch of huckleberry autumn.