Central Armature Works – Sunset, Thursday, 8 September 2016

William Van Doren, CENTRAL ARMATURE WORKS. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on Arches 140# watercolor paper, 17 x 23.

The painting took off from a layer of dark purple clouds over the setting sun. The title popped up because it’s the name of a business in D.C. where my dad worked as a salesman in the mid-1950s. I was amazed to find it still exists. They refurbished and sold electric motors and parts; now they’re “power apparatus specialists.”

Stone and Blood – Sunset, Monday, 27 May 2013

William Van Doren, STONE AND BLOOD. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

For my father, Theodore Van Doren (1926–1980), Staff Sgt. with the Fourth Armored Division, Patton’s Third Army, 1944–1946.

Sunset, Tuesday, 1 June 2010

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

Sunrise, Monday, 18 January 2010

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

Route 20, Stony Point to Barboursville, 9 a.m.

The Southwest Mountains, the low mountains, the Southwest Mountains here more brown than blue without benefit of distance, with the brown-violet woods of winter, the soft rounded summits barely distinguished one from another, a comforting line of friends along my right shoulder, like the song my father used to sing, “There’s a rainbow ’round my shoulder” – the Southwest Mountains, a rainbow ’round my shoulder.

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. 

What’s Happening?

On December 11th, I picked up some effects, papers pertaining to family history, that had belonged at one time to my aunt Elizabeth Van Doren Ankers. In the top of the box was a letter from 1947, sent from the Russian sector of Berlin, concerning a German woman my father had been engaged to, at age 19, before he came home and met my mother. This is something neither I nor any of my siblings had known about. In any case, the letter informed my grandmother – Dad’s mother – of the woman’s death in a railway accident. The date of her death: December 11th.

A few days later, I signed a contract to edit and produce a book commemorating the anniversary of the founding of a local hospice. That night, we turned on the television, as we usually do – currently, having exhausted our favorite rentable series, we’re going episode by episode through a British series, Midsomer Murders, that belongs quite solidly to the second tier.

That night’s show: murders involving the founding of a hospice.

O.K., fine. A few nights later, the episode was titled “Dead in the Water,” It included several references to rats, including a dead one. Meanwhile, we had placed a vase under a leaky pipe. Surprising that nothing like this had ever happened in 15 years of living in a house so permeable to mice, but, you guessed it: that very night, a mouse ... literally ‘dead in the water’.

(We often are aware of having a mouse or two around – no rats that I know of, although for a while we suspected we were hosting a mouse we called, thanks to The Princess Bride, a ROVUS – Rodent of Very Unusual Size.) 

The next one is not quite as unnerving. Last night, as the snowstorm was finally ending, our lights kept flickering – the power would go off for half a second – and we kept wondering, especially given our many power outages here in the country – Are we about to lose power? We filled more water jugs (important if you depend on a well) and made other preparations. We didn’t lose power, fortunately. And that meant we could watch another episode! This one just happened to take place at Christmastime (not a planned coincidence). It opens with folks placing Christmas lights outside ... and seeing them go out for a moment.

“Not another power cut!” they cry, before power comes back on – and someone inside the house shoots himself.

So, that’s it, up to the moment, I think. Perhaps I should be worried, except that strange synchronicities have happened to me many times before – just not quite so thick and fast. As for the connections to mortality, I ignore them – or take them simply as a sign of something serious. Something’s happening – I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is.