Sunset, Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.A furious heavy rain for most of an hour, then this break showed up in the west, while it was still raining here, and lasted ... just long enough to complicate my life! Within ten minutes it was raining hard again, and the horizon was once again completely gray.

The way sudden changes in the weather ‘complicate’ things got me thinking about how this series is very much a species of performance art – except I’ve done performance art before, and it was nothing like this. Usually one gets to pick and choose the work and plan a show carefully.

To give one example, to fill just three or four minutes of a show, I painted very close copies of the trees in “Trees Between Fields” (a painting you can find on the side of the page here) – except instead of being ten inches tall, painted in oil on canvas, these trees were eight feet tall, spray-painted on styrofoam, and carved out to make ‘sculptures’ that I could move around on the stage. (Nasty stuff, styrofoam, to work with on that scale.) The painting itself took perhaps a year – I used to work very gradually, and in one day might add just a few small glazes – and wasn’t done until I felt I had got it just where I wanted it. The cutouts took an intense couple of weeks.

With the sunsets, whatever I can do within the hour – involving maybe 20 to 30 minutes of actual painting – is what we get, and I never know if I’ll have any idea how to approach that night’s sky. I think it’s pretty surprising, after thousands of these, that before two nights ago (the 8th) I don’t think I’d ever painted a sunset with the rain trailing from the clouds.

But then ‘Howard’ says – you may remember Howard from the D-Day anniversary – “When you’ve seen one sunset, haven’t you pretty much seen ’em all?”

Every once in a while, for a moment or two I wish that that were true. Happily, though, in fact, the situation is more difficult, more ... complicated.

Update on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 08:56AM by BVD

This was the scene as I worked on the painting.

The added element here has to do with the fact that Flint is deathly afraid of thunderstorms, and thinks that staying close to me will afford him some measure of protection. So I was a little bit hindered by the 65-pound foxhound at my feet.

I don’t have any one system or protocol for painting skies – it all depends on the situation. This one was a little unusual in that I had almost completely finished the ‘foreground’ – the gray clouds that had been nearest, above my head – before doing the rest, including the cerulean/gray horizon I’m working on here. I’m painting on an Arches cold-pressed watercolor block, 18 x 24, with margins taped to yield 16 x 20.

And yes, the entire house is filled with sunrise/sunset canvases like those in the background.