Sunset, Tuesday, 24 November 2009

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

Depth perception: As previously mentioned, this painter’s is not the best. No need for alarm – my misperceptions were all at a distance of over 70 yards and didn’t involve the traffic I was in – but out on the road today trees and houses exchanged places, distant trucks were in front of, no, they were beyond traffic lights, brake lights were behind a fence, until it turned out they weren’t.

A question is, which came first, the feeling that all things are one, or the visual impression? I have an answer – and it involves more detailed autobiography than anybody really wants to know. But I’d like to think the most acute vision could be consistent with my universalist fuzztone.

On an unexpectedly related note, painting isn’t the easiest just after throwing ten-foot lengths of black walnut out of a shed, running a chain saw, splitting the rounds, and stacking the wood. Call me a 170-pound weakling – my arms are a little shaky. But maybe disability, if we can call it that, offers aesthetic opportunity. Not that these things have to be mutually exclusive, but perhaps any degree of inability to be precisely ‘objectively accurate’ encourages one to try to be honest instead.