Don’t Turn Back the Dawn – 2012 Campaign Poster – New Edition

New, improved edition of the poster, available through Imagekind or RedBubble.

Don’t Turn Back the Dawn – 2012 Campaign Poster

Just released today, January 20th, exactly one year before next inauguration day, this poster features my painting of the Washington, D.C., sunrise from Barack Obama’s inauguration. Available in a variety of sizes, framed or unframed. Also carried on RedBubble.

The Higher Ceiling (Sunset, Saturday, 30 July 2011)

William Theodore Van Doren, THE HIGHER CEILING (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Sunset, Wednesday, 2 December 2009

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

I’m sure there are plenty of other bloggers who have to fix a chainsaw in the pouring rain while composing an entry and watching the sunset in order to post a daily painting. We could form a professional association. The name doesn’t really matter, as long as it makes the acronym M E N T A L.

I’ve been catching up with an old friend who was a significant person in my life, and she wrote something I found quite striking. We were both once strict “laissez-faire libertarians,” part of a group that, at the time, would have objected to being labeled ‘conservative’. However, conservative is what we were, when you get down to it; some in our old cohort have even since slithered on over into that grotto called neoconservatism.

In any event, her comment was somehow the most accessible explanation I’ve seen for why a person would mature into a liberal.

I have moved way across the spectrum since the early days of knowing you and today would shamelessly describe myself as a tax-and-spend liberal. One of my biggest frustrations is with the reluctance of the American people to devote themselves and their money to creating a more robust community and to assuring a more satisfying life experience for others sharing the planet at the very same moment in time.

Simple humanity and common sense.

Sunset, Thursday, 22 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Fifth Street Extended/Old Lynchburg Road, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Tonight I was in training for election officers who will be working Tuesday, November 3rd. Some readers may remember my report of June 9th, after our previous election – perhaps the most widely read post in the history of this site so far, and certainly the post most visited from within the Commonwealth of Virginia. My story may have had some effect: Will Harvey, secretary of the board of elections, issued a pointed caution against political conversation by election officers in the polling place, even when voters are not present, noting that “debates could erupt” and disrupt or prejudice the electoral process.

On the way down to the training, I was thinking about how our government works, and watching the sky the whole time, vaguely wondering how its government works – the sky and the universe it tends to symbolize. Is it anarchy, some sort of democracy of the elements, or, as so many believe, an absolute monarchy?

Personally, I’m leaning toward a league of devas. I don’t think I’d mind if they took over here as well.

Sunset, Thursday, 15 October 2009

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

Rain and 46°F.

Yesterday Bob Leweke, morning host on regional NPR station WMRA, introduced the weather forecast this way: “For the next few days we have a 100% chance of dreary.” It’s a little bit difficult to gauge the situation now from here, but late this afternoon as I drove along the Southwest Mountains the clouds were only a few hundred feet above the ground.

Usually at times like this, in painting I look for the light, even if another observer of the sunset would probably say it wasn’t really there at all. Either that, or go with the darkness. An example of that approach that I like is the next-to-last sunset in the few paintings I’ve been able to photograph so far from 1997 – November 6th, from down by the railroad tracks in Charlottesville, near the University of Virginia Medical Center.

Actually, now that I look again at that painting, and yesterday’s, I realize what’s happening is both the light and the dark.

While I’m referencing WMRA, I’d like to recommend a fine blog by their super-producer Martha Woodroof, who is, among many other things, one of the best writer-reporters anywhere. You’ll sometimes hear her stories on national NPR. I’ve recently added a standing link to Martha’s blog at the side of this page.

On the 12th, Martha’s post started out with the furor over Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to buy the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. This got her into the subject not simply of Limbaugh’s controversial status but his popularity as a commentator. 

I had hoped our romance with polarization had ended on election day, but it appears that it hasn’t – if, that is, Rush Limbaugh’s ratings are any way to take the national pulse. And I don’t mean to pick on Limbaugh. He’s just such a clear-cut example of the kind of figurehead ranters we Americans spend our time listening to.

We elected President Obama in what appears to have been a brief flirtation with the concept of consensus and civility. Yet how impatient we have become with his efforts at consensus-building, his incessant information-gathering, his unfailing politeness in response to rudeness.

Is consensus-building just too much work for us as a culture? Is arguing and fighting about getting what we want, when we want it, too ingrained in us to allow serious consideration of reasonable compromise? Could it be that we are actually more comfortable, as a culture, wading through the wake of polarization left by The Decider et al.? Can we change our political conversation to one of consensus-building without being willing to change our own conversational tastes?

I had heard Martha talk before about the need for civil discourse and debate but hadn’t thought much about it, perhaps because I don’t feel all that civil myself on many hot-button topics. In other words, I didn’t see how things could really be any different. But something in her column jumped a spark for me.

I remembered reading not long ago how Nixon-Agnew (with the speechwriting help of Pat Buchanan) launched a successful ‘wedge’ strategy that has been expanded, developed and refined to this day – and they did this in part by personifying political positions. Some positions belonged to effete disloyal hippies – and others to patriotic true Americans of the silent majority. From that period, and increasingly during the traumas wrought by the previous administration, political positions, political opinions, have become no longer something we THINK, but something we ARE. We can’t talk to each other anymore because we’re not just talking about debatable topics of interest ‘out there’ (outside of ourselves), we’re protecting our very identities, ‘in here’ ... the whole thing was made very personal and we take it personally. When political controversy arises, many of us can hardly breathe, much less settle down and have a reasonable debate. As much as we may not think we agree with the personification of politics, many of us suffer from its consequences and its ongoing influence.