Sunset, Saturday, 12 December 2009

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

Clouds on the increase at sunset.

Yesterday I drove up and down western Fairfax County, Virginia, to Great Falls and back, and on the return saw some things about the view of the Blue Ridge I’d never fully noticed.

On the glamorously named Fairfax County Parkway, heading south, a bridge elevates the roadway in order to cross over Route 50, or, as the big green sign says, Lee Jackson Mem Hwy.

At a distance of some 40 or more miles, the view of the mountains has a completely different character than we see here, in most of these paintings, less than 15 miles away. From the parkway, the unobstructed vista shows a low blue wall stretching all the way across the horizon, across a significant portion of the state.

The view here (at Stony Point) is physical, natural, palpable and specific. There, it’s almost an abstraction – instead of particular things, more like seeing graphic elements in an atlas or an arrangement of symbols.

That’s very much the view I grew up with, and must have bonded with, until the age of five, from my grandfather’s and father’s dairy farm in Ryan (near Ashburn, east of Leesburg). In 1982, when I began a large painting that marked a revival of sorts for me (“Birthday,” viewable at the bio page), the very first thing I did was a profile of the Blue Ridge, from memory, or perhaps by heart, across the top – and I was in Los Angeles.

From where I was yesterday, the Blue Ridge appeared like a conceptual element of geography and history; the glories and tragedies of Virginia (which are mostly one and the same – for example, the aforementioned Lee and Jackson) align in some relationship to it. Instead of the particular ridges and summits we see here, I saw a panorama of colonial exploration coming up against the native range of the original Americans, the gallant Army of Northern Virginia and its disgraced cause, the substantial small towns and crossroads villages on this side and the Shenandoah Valley beyond, red clay and quartz and dogwood, rocky mountainside pastures, honeysuckle- and blackberry-studded fencelines of piedmont farms, broad shallow creeks and rivers curving east out of the woods – an illustrated and annotated map of my beautiful old Virginia.