Indian Summer Premiere (Sunset, Saturday, 23 October 2010)

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

Columbian Summer (Sunset, Tuesday, 12 October 2010)

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

I’ve been thinking about the sunrise, actually, on the 12th of October, 1492, at Samana Cay, now thought to be the first place Columbus landed. What a bittersweet moment, the last sunrise of pre-European America. I’m not wild about the concept of ‘Columbian’ anything, but ... here we are.

PreColumbian Summer (Sunset, Saturday, 9 October 2010)

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

A third day of warmth added rose, smoke and absinthe to the palette. We haven’t had a frost yet, and therefore can’t call this Indian Summer, so the title is a sort of reverse compliment to the upcoming holiday.

October and Smoke (Sunset, Friday, 1 October 2010)

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

In fact it’s not smoke (I’m pretty sure, after two days of heavy rain), but the haze in an otherwise clear sky looked like distant fire and seemed to promise Indian Summer to come.

Sunset, Monday, 16 November 2009

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

Now we have our second straight day of Indian Summer, with trees half bare and the strange combination of warmth and horizontal sunlight crashing through the woods. In entire fields of blown-out goldenrod, the sun makes blinding coronas behind tall flourishes of white filament. I know there’s no photosynthesis going on, the goldenrod’s dry stalks and curled leaves are dust gray, but I also don’t believe anything is wasted in nature, including this light. I suspect photosynthesis of a different order, in which any light we admit into ourselves, like any degree of light or love we may be able to give, is gathered and grows even beyond our natural lives.

Sunset, Sunday, 8 November 2009

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

Driving home from Charlottesville today, on a perfect Indian Summer late afternoon (if you didn’t get the memo about Indian Summer, it was here), I was struck by the difference between the scale of what we can see, or notice, while we’re rushing between places or tasks or errands, and what we can actually spend time with and get to know. The cases in point were beautiful trees, one along High Street and another near the beginning of Hydraulic Road, of all places. In each case, although in different ways, there was the peculiar November picture of bare branches mixed with the remaining leaves – gold sunlit limbs reaching to the roadside, and scatterings of leaves still part green, part yellow or orange, part dry brown, in the slanted light. I felt the impulse to stop and really look at them, but as it was there wasn’t even time to tell if they were sycamores or oaks or maples or something else altogether. Driving down the road, or just going through a workday, can mean glimpsing dozens of possible paintings or stories but not being able to paint or tell any of them. Sunset and sunrise solve this problem, in the sense that they are both something to see and a period of time in which to see them – the visual and the temporal together. As I’ve tried to suggest elsewhere, they have as much to do with an appreciation of time as with any pictorial qualities. And, conveniently, they take up the entire sky – it’s very difficult to drive past the sunset.