I Believe in Yesterday (Sunset, Monday, 10 January 2011)

William Van Doren, I BELIEVE IN YESTERDAY (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Title from my mother’s favorite song. Helen Bezilla Van Doren, 23 June 1923 – 10 January 1986.

Sunset, Friday, 15 January 2010

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

Happy Birthday, MLK. My parents – even my parents made us shut up and listen to that speech, on the radio on the way back from the beach.

Following from yesterday’s mention of Andy Warhol: Something I appreciated, as a painter and in a larger way as an artist, was Louis Menand’s essay on Warhol in the January 11th New Yorker. While commenting, more or less, on recent books about Warhol, Menand manages to distill the history of contemporary art criticism. For anyone like me who missed the meeting about Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and what has come after, it’s a brilliantly accessible and illuminating short course. 

Sunset, Tuesday, 23 June 2009

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

For Emily, with love.

Emily’s a former backhoe operator and homecoming queen, a longtime blackjack dealer at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, a wild horse woman (woman who rides wild horses, in addition to the other meaning), and an ace stained glass artist, as well as someone who cares for other people, both for a living and in her life. My sister. She shares her birthday with our mom, Helen Bezilla Van Doren (1923–1986).

Emily drove across the country, from Norfolk to L.A., on a motorcycle when she was 20. Actually, when she got to the Grand Canyon her boyfriend, Cruz Treviño, met her and they rode the rest of the way together. Cruz is responsible for inspiring me to start writing music; I think if he and Emily had stayed together my dad might have lived another five years just so he could keep arguing with Cruz.

The only counsel my dad offered Emily for her trip was to give her his buck knife in a leather sheath.

Emily thinks Mom was a little envious. Her advice: “Go west, young man!”

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I’m very happy to note that as of today we have an index to earlier entries (there’s a link also on the right side of the page).