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.