Tweets Illustrated: The Woodpile

William Van Doren, watercolor and ink, 7 x 9.

Sunset, Friday, 5 March 2010

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

Henry David Thoreau:

Unless you watch, you do not know when the sun goes down. It is like a candle extinguished without smoke. A moment ago you saw that glittering orb amid the dry oak leaves in the horizon and now you can detect no trace of it.

In our case we have contrails for smoke.

Update on Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 08:29AM by BVD

This probably wasn’t clear: I like contrails. 

Update on Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 08:33AM by BVD

And smoke, too, for that matter.

Sunset, Sunday, 6 December 2009

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

With some snow on the ground, it’s finally turned fairly cold; all three cats stretched out near the wood stove (our only heat source) all day – Flint the foxhound keeping a respectful distance on the sofa. Since this site has been mentioning firewood-cutting almost every other day, I thought I’d show some of the results. This was the scene in December 2005, but there’s a remarkably similar-looking pile out on the porch right now.

William Theodore Van Doren. India ink and watercolor, 2005, approx. 8 x 10.

The quote from Thoreau was added when we used this sketch as a Christmas card.

(Inside, the card read “Warmth, Love, Cheer – Now and for the New Year.” The sketch is available as a print or a card at a new Imagekind gallery.)

Wherever you are, I hope you keep warm.

Sunset, Sunday, 20 September 2009

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

This is what they call ‘Mostly Cloudy’.

Sometimes I wonder what Thoreau would have done, or how he might have done, if he’d been in the position of issuing blog postings every day from Walden Pond. I mean, wouldn’t there have been quite a few days when he would have been unable to think of anything more to say than “Jesus, it’s cold!” or “Harvested 3 bu. beans ... swam across pond ... listened to bullfrogs”? 

Henry David strikes me as the deliberative sort, probably not the easiest or most fluid of writers. He wrote about half of Walden while he was living at the pond, between 1845 and 1847, but then went through seven drafts before publishing the book in 1854. As you probably know, it was a failure, commercially.

But I do wonder also if it might not have helped Thoreau to have the kind of daily imperative to communicate that many of us feel today. Thoreau took time to distill and compress, and in a sense elevate, his experiences into the book so many have come to know. But he also said, after Walden was published:

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

I am happy to know that Thoreau could write this even as he was sitting in a house filled with unsold books. But speaking for myself, I know that if I’m a hero, it’s only in my own mind, and so I am strictly my own imaginary hero. And I find that learning how to write a ‘good journal’, and particularly to both write and publish in real time, can be extremely challenging. Those who can do it – hello again, Stephen Fry, Andrew Sullivan, James D. Griffioen, among others – these may be poetic heroes for our time.

Sunset (Twilight), Saturday, 22 August 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Except for the obligatory excerpt in a high school text, which apparently I didn’t find very interesting at the time, I came to Thoreau late – or perhaps I should be a little more optimistic and say lately – within the last four years. So if I say that painting each day’s sun sometimes seems a little like going out to Walden in instalments, it’s something that wouldn’t have occurred to me at the beginning – or else I might have done it sooner! For me this deep oval of sky, that I visit every day, is very much a sort of pond.

Today at two we had overcast and embedded thunderstorms. The point of view is almost the same as in last night’s sunset painting, just a little farther left, or north.

Pencil, watercolor pencil, chalk pastel and wash, 5 x 7.

Sunset, Sunday, 9 August 2009

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

Following Thoreau, in Walden, I might compare the Blue Ridge to a sort of universal music.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

That’s the sweet sort of sound I’d noticed, as a child, when we stayed up on the side of Fox Mountain – a filtered music rising from the valley floor and off the opposite massive wall of Pasture Fence Mountain. Now, each night, all sounds between here and the mountains, from Fox Mountain and Pigeon Top to the hum of U.S. 29 a mile away to the birds in the nearby woods, merge into one twilight tone.

L’heure bleue, the Blue Ridge, a blue note.