Keep It Hid (Sunset, Tuesday, 14 September 2010)

William Van Doren, Keep It Hid (Sunset from Charlottesville, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

I was at The Pavilion in downtown Charlottesville to see The Black Keys, and as open to roaming as the venue is, I still couldn’t really see “the sunset,” which was happening to the north (to the right) behind all the downtown buildings, and which, from what little I could see, was a technicolor spectacular. (Sorry about that. O.K., maybe not.) This then was the southwest sky at sunset, looking out toward the nearby Ragged Mountains, of Edgar Allan Poe fame. Edgar Allan Poe and The Black Keys belong together anyhow.

The Black Keys were nothing short of sensational. No one should underestimate the importance and influence of Patrick Carney, the drummer – that would be a great injustice, especially since the two guys really work as one – but Dan Auerbach has to be the most intimidating writer-guitarist-singer-performer I’ve ever seen, going back to The Beatles, 1966. Speaking of which, I was joking to Laura after the show how people talk about using surviving members of The Who to reconstitute The Beatles, or vice-versa. (Kind of grotesque.) But with Auerbach, you could replace John and George, and we don’t really need Paul, so that leaves ... The Black Keys!

Sorry, Macca fans, couldn’t resist. And Carney is much more than what was just implied, i.e., reference to Mr. Starkey.

And then The Black Keys are something really different on the axis of blues and soul ... sort of like the blues died and went to heaven.

Painting title comes from Dan Auerbach’s great 2009 solo album, but with different meanings, one of which is that the sunset was hidden from view.

Sunset, Saturday, 1 May 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Madison Mills, Madison County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Sketched at Woodberry Forest School just before we went in to see the Brent Cirves and Michael Johnson musical adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Sunset, Monday, 22 February 2010

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

Many ages ago (in blog terms – December 9th) I wrote about a word I’d encountered in the Edgar Allan Poe story “Mystification.” The word was uniquity – Poe used it to refer to the quality of being unique, and I had to go back to a 1955 version of The Oxford Universal Dictionary to find it.

In that post, thinking I was pretty cute, I referred to my ‘obliquity’ – believing I was cleverly making up a word.

Last night I began reading the Poe story “The Man That Was Used Up” – when what to my wondering eyes should appear:

They [his eyes] were of a deep hazel, exceedingly large and lustrous; and there was about them, ever and anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression.

Well, shoot. Turns out obliquity’s “even more of a word” than uniquity – it’s in current dictionaries, and seems to be used to describe the degree of an oblique angle, in addition (perhaps) to the way I used it. Obliquity – I should have noticed even my spell-check didn’t mind it.

I think in France they call this tragiquité. Well, O.K., maybe not.

Meanwhile, sunset tonight is fog and a lingering cold rain. The dense granular snow and the air seem to be meeting as some sort of middle substance between slowly melting snow and solidifying atmosphere.

Sunset, Sunday, 21 February 2010

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

I’m sitting in a chair by the woodstove with my notebooks and pens, Pi the cat is on the oriental rug in the other half of the living room (it is indeed divided into halves), lying halfway on her right side, head resting on her right front leg, paw outstretched toward me. Flint the foxhound has thrown himself down diagonally across the big pet bed (a dog bed that each of the three cats believes is actually the perfect size for a cat bed) right in front of the woodstove (the closer the better, in his opinion), his head right by my foot. Lily, the blind genius just two months shy of 18, is taking a break from perching on my lap and lies directly behind me in her spot under the little table by a window, her head toward me. They all seem, to my imagination, to be trying to help direct the flow of something or other to me – maybe the foregoing is in fact the whole thing.

The robins hopping (or bobbing) along on the dead oak leaves where the snow has melted, out the windows to my right, I’m not sure they care to be part of this energy grid we’ve got going.

A copy of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, parked in the triangle of struts of a wooden stool that serves as my morning desk (or deskette) – the book’s at an angle toward me complementary to Flint’s, but I can’t say if it’s there to inspire or maybe just intimidate the hell out of me.

Pi’s up on the bench to observe the robins. I think she’s too small to deal with them, but that’s not what she’s thinking.

In the disgracefully little time I spend reading – in the morning at breakfast and in a few minutes at the end of the night – I’ve been reading Proust and Poe, respectively. (Lily just decided to get back up here. Kneecaps, prepare for claws.) Picking up the Proust, I discover I’m at a point where the narrator’s grandmother is trying to encourage in him a steadier, more reasonable temperament, which she believes will bring

more happiness and dignity to life than were ever afforded by cultivation of the opposite tastes, which led the Baudelaires, the Edgar Allan Poes, the Verlaines, and the Rimbauds into sufferings and low esteem, the likes of which my grandmother wished to spare me.

I believe that at any given moment any of us may be justified in wondering whether something or someone is messing with us.

Sunset, Wednesday, 9 December 2009

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

The word of the day is something I encountered in “Mystification,” a crazy little story by Edgar Allan Poe. 

That he was unique appeared so undeniable, that it was deemed impertinent to inquire wherein the uniquity consisted.

(The story can be found online in a few places, all of which seem to share the defect of not showing italics.) 

Uniquity ... somehow sounds bad, as in “a den of uniquity.”

My spell check, no surprise, objects to the word. Webster’s doesn’t have it. However, it’s in a 1955 revision of The Oxford Universal Dictionary.

The story’s plot turns on characters intimidating, or seeking to intimidate, each other – to “mystify” – through the use of very arcane and particular mumbo-jumbo. It’s an appropriate device, since the story satirizes the very arcane and particular codes of dueling.

What this has to do with sunset ... not sure. Write it off, perhaps, as obliquity.

Sunset, Thursday, 19 November 2009

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

Rain pouring down this morning prompted a strange dream sequence of thoughts – or what our friend E. A. Poe might have termed a ‘fancy’ – speculating on what happens to the rain when it falls – if it remembers in some way, in any sense at all, how it fell, and its life in the sky, as it sinks into the ground or runs off in streams, earthbound – if the rain ever knows any sense of returning when it rises as vapor, burned up by the sun, pulled up into clouds – if the same generations of rain ever return to form the same clouds, if only for an instant, if only as a sport. And if I could perhaps catch them at it.

Although I don’t believe visual evidence is needed for any painting, I did see bands of blue and violet tonight, as afterimages of a pervasive gray. Still raining at sunset.