Sunset, Monday, 7 September 2009 (Labor Day)

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

Behind sunset, vast blue night and bright stars.

Part of the day was devoted to making peach ice cream, adapting a recipe from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook: A Consuming Passion, by IALW chef-owner Patrick O’Connell. Despite the Inn’s reputation for complex, almost theatrical dishes, the recipes in this book are really accessible. To make what may be the best peach ice cream you’ve ever had (I think the secret is the vanilla), just do the ice cream part of the three-part “Peach Intensifier” dessert, cutting it in half for a small home ice cream maker. Just don’t mix white and yellow peaches – I’m not sure white peaches will work at all, but I know from sad experience that they don’t work with yellow.

If you have peaches coming out of your ears and are in dire need of this recipe, just contact me and I’ll write it out for you. In our case, the ice cream–making was occasioned not by Aunt Millie’s Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, peaches, but by our very own Crozet, Virginia, peaches, which have been fantastic this year.

And if you’re thinking it’s trivial for me to go off on a tangent about cooking – what, in this blog, are you kidding? – this morning I happened to catch NPR’s On Point, and a segment with an author who says humans are the apes who ultimately mastered fire and learned to cook. (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.)

Now, let’s see about those unbelievably human Mark Bittman Brussels sprouts ...

Sunset, Tuesday, 1 September 2009

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

I was very excited tonight to see, I think for the first time since this site started, a perfectly clear, ‘blank’ sky to work with. I’d been wondering what I’d do if I got one of these again; although this may not seem like much of a departure, it reflects development that’s been going on in the paintings for the past six weeks or so.

As soon as this painting was done, the sky went through a phenomenal series of twilight changes. The result was a deeply glowing old-gold horizon, a dome of intense blue-violet and, in between, a rose-violet aura that shimmered like Northern Lights. Yes, yes, I just may have to try to paint it tomorrow.

I’ve spent much of the day catching up with posts and images from Pittsburgh, and find myself not having thought of a single thing to say for tonight, so I’ll break style a bit and post some ‘home photos’ that each reprise aspects of the trip.

From the 27th, this is my Aunt Millie and me in her kitchen on her 90th birthday. In case you somehow can’t tell from the photo, Millie is a joy.

As reported on the 28th, we went up the Duquesne Incline – and here we’re at the top. The trio of yellow bridges that you can perhaps just make out on the Allegheny River, after the first yellow bridge, as mentioned on the 29th, are the Roberto Clemente, the Andy Warhol, and the Rachel Carson.

Finally, we’ve also discussed Pittsburgh (“SIXBURGH”) and football. Well, amazingly, everywhere we went, even at the top of the Duquesne Incline ...

... we spotted celebrity athletes with names like Hines Ward, Troy Polamalu, and Ben Roethlisberger. Fantastic!

Sunset, Sunday, 30 August 2009

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

I forgot to mention that my Aunt Millie in Pittsburgh, on the morning of her 90th birthday, made cheddar biscuits, from scratch, for us to give to our dog, Flint. We can now report that Flint, the most discerning gourmand hound (‘It’s not a treat until I say it’s a treat’), has awarded Millie’s biscuits his highest rating.

Millie also gave us some tomatoes she’s grown this summer in her backyard garden, and she wanted us to take home a few Chambersburg [Pennsylvania] peaches.

She said, “Oh, every year we just can’t wait for those Chambersburg peaches, let me tell you, and they’re finally here!”

To be 90 and looking forward to this year’s Chambersburg peaches – I think that’s good.

Sunset, Thursday, 27 August 2009 / Notes from Pittsburgh, Part 1

William Theodore Van Doren. Plum, Pa. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Sunset for Thursday the 27th was seen from Plum, Pennsylvania, the home of my Aunt Millie and where, as it turned out, we celebrated her 90th birthday, at a very strange restaurant called John Anthony’s. Millie lives on her own in the same little house she and her late husband bought from his employer, the coal company, back in 1950 or 1951. They’d been living in Plum and he’d been working in the mine for a few years before that.

Plum, technically, or postally, is part of Pittsburgh but in fact is an outlying eastern suburb.

The Plum sunset over the John Anthony’s parking lot indeed came in a variety of soft plum colors – mostly hazy blue cloud with some suggestions of red-violet and gold. Plumes of plum-colored smoke. That’s more interesting than it actually looked, but – isn’t that the point of writing?

We’d had tons of traffic trouble getting across Pittsburgh to our hotel on Neville Island, part of it because of unhelpful directions from Mapquest, part of it because of the usual tie-ups where Pittsburgh’s traffic narrows to get through tunnels (made necessary by the city’s formidable ridges), but most of it thanks to insane paving projects that stopped traffic on major streets during the afternoon rush hour.

When we mentioned these to Millie, she said, “Oh, that’s because they want to get all the potholes fixed before the G20.”

This was the first we’d heard about the G20 being in Pittsburgh. As the Huffington Post explained, back in May:

For years, political leaders, community activists and ordinary residents tried to convince the world beyond its three rivers that this former industrial powerhouse was on the rise with an economy built on higher education, medicine and new technology.

From September 24 to 25, [Pittsburgh] will get a chance to prove its point to the world leaders representing 85 percent of the world’s economy. ... The White House announced that President Barack Obama decided to host the next Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh as a way of illustrating what success can look like.

When I came back to the hotel this morning from my coffee run, I reported to Laura:

“On radio, on TV, everywhere, this town is obsessed with just one thing.”

“Oh ... the G20?”

“No – football!”

Sunset, Wednesday, 26 August 2009

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

Off to Pittsburgh for about four days – it’s the 90th birthday tomorrow of my delightful aunt Millie, my mom’s sister and the only surviving sibling of either of my parents. You should be seeing three Pittsburgh sunsets, although they may not get posted until about Monday. Meanwhile, I’ll be leaving notes and sketches here as I can.

*      *      *      *

Walking through the woods into the fields today was strangely like going from thought to expression.

Inside the woods was all leaves and letters, details – dead trees on the ground, sentences here and there, ideas, fragments, pools of water on intermittent streams.

Step out into the open fields – boom! Under the wide blue sky, it’s a world of fully developed, finished thought – of books, films, musicals, essays, epic poems. The works. Fireworks.

On a lucky day you catch that transition, from the woods into the fields. Something you had been thinking becomes something you can say.