Co-Creation

The collected notes and notebooks of decades were with me out on the slate floor of the porch in the sun – a couple of stacks of writings and drawings, ideas and outlines, in every sort of form, from the oft-mentioned Moleskine notebooks to CVS Chunky Pads to sleek Apica books to notes written on the backs of check carbons (I have a lot of those). (Folded into thirds they fit in my jeans pocket on walks.) Forming a third unit or stack of sorts, I had with me for diversion a volume of Proust I’ve almost finished and one of John Hart (unopened – I have no idea).

I was immediately joined by our two female cats. Pi, the young one, got hold of a red file folder filled with recently excavated ancient notes and started biting the edges of papers and pushing the folder all around the porch. Lily, blind, beautiful and recently turned 18, found a way to recline against one of the piles of notes and the books, while Pi ceased her labors and stretched belly-up behind the other pile. I sat at the edge of the porch with my back to one of the posts, facing the sun. Lily and Pi, who’ve recently suffered incursions by a local feral tomcat, seemed to relax with me positioned between them and the yard.

I had felt on the verge of something, which was why I had the notes out there in the first place, but couldn’t bring myself to move anything. I sat for as long as I could in the sun, petting the two, then left them the books and my notes. The great synthesis, if there is one, can wait.

Sunset, Sunday, 21 February 2010

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

I’m sitting in a chair by the woodstove with my notebooks and pens, Pi the cat is on the oriental rug in the other half of the living room (it is indeed divided into halves), lying halfway on her right side, head resting on her right front leg, paw outstretched toward me. Flint the foxhound has thrown himself down diagonally across the big pet bed (a dog bed that each of the three cats believes is actually the perfect size for a cat bed) right in front of the woodstove (the closer the better, in his opinion), his head right by my foot. Lily, the blind genius just two months shy of 18, is taking a break from perching on my lap and lies directly behind me in her spot under the little table by a window, her head toward me. They all seem, to my imagination, to be trying to help direct the flow of something or other to me – maybe the foregoing is in fact the whole thing.

The robins hopping (or bobbing) along on the dead oak leaves where the snow has melted, out the windows to my right, I’m not sure they care to be part of this energy grid we’ve got going.

A copy of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, parked in the triangle of struts of a wooden stool that serves as my morning desk (or deskette) – the book’s at an angle toward me complementary to Flint’s, but I can’t say if it’s there to inspire or maybe just intimidate the hell out of me.

Pi’s up on the bench to observe the robins. I think she’s too small to deal with them, but that’s not what she’s thinking.

In the disgracefully little time I spend reading – in the morning at breakfast and in a few minutes at the end of the night – I’ve been reading Proust and Poe, respectively. (Lily just decided to get back up here. Kneecaps, prepare for claws.) Picking up the Proust, I discover I’m at a point where the narrator’s grandmother is trying to encourage in him a steadier, more reasonable temperament, which she believes will bring

more happiness and dignity to life than were ever afforded by cultivation of the opposite tastes, which led the Baudelaires, the Edgar Allan Poes, the Verlaines, and the Rimbauds into sufferings and low esteem, the likes of which my grandmother wished to spare me.

I believe that at any given moment any of us may be justified in wondering whether something or someone is messing with us.

Sunset, Friday, 1 January 2010

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

I’ve tried to describe, a few times now, how often I have to move all around the place here to really see the sunset, and then basically put together a composite of several views. Lately I ran into someone’s account of almost exactly the same process, and, quelle surprise, this guy Proust tells it pretty well.

Only his problem isn’t steadily growing woods in the foreground, he’s traveling by train, and at dawn he “glimpsed, in the windowpane, above a little black copse, serrated clouds of downy softness in a shade of immutable pink.”

“Soon,” he says, “great reserves of light built up behind [the pink]. They brightened further, spreading a blush across the sky; and I stared at it through the glass, straining to see it better, as the color of it seemed to be privy to the profoundest secrets of nature.”

Ah, but then the train changes directions –

and I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, till I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.

Sunset, Wednesday, 16 December 2009

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

I had a choice from among innumerable stages of a clear winter twilight. I did one that reminded me of the sky over the slate roofs of the dorms at Hopkins, after I’d come outside from washing dishes.

I ran across this line in the second book of In Search of Lost Time (James Grieve translation). I’ve gone back to look at it a dozen times.

Our furthest-reaching resolutions are always made in a short-lived state of mind.

Proust isn’t saying these resolutions are made lightly or at all superficially – that’s one of the things I found so interesting. What mainly has kept me thinking about the line is how uncannily true it seems. A text for any biography.

I was amazed not to find the quote in Bartlett’s, whether in bound book or online, or anywhere in Bartleby.com, although it would be easy enough to miss, in that mess.

Sunset, Saturday, 5 December 2009

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

Snowing since mid-morning, although with the air in the mid-30s, mostly just a heavy trace on the ground.

I was surprised by something in Proust, first just by the fact that he said it, and then by the strange way it struck me as relating to two seemingly very different things: internet and sunset (web and sun).

For, after all, my mind had to be a single thing; or perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theater, where, though every spectator sits in a separate place, there is only one stage.

Images of the Sunset

This all started – well, in a way the change really started the moment I began painting sunsets and sunrises over 14 years ago. From the beginning, there’s always been tension between two tendencies.

On one side there’s what you might call just keeping the appointment with the sunset – just doing it – being there and painting. Entailed in this are the many implications, meditative and metaphysical, of ‘following the sun’.

On the other side, there’s the goal of painting a certain kind of image – an aesthetic goal. In other words, making a damn good painting.

To paint the sunset every day – and for two years both sunrise and sunset – especially while earning a living doing something else – means the painting you make is the painting you get. There’s no time for do-overs or revisions or long processes of development or elaboration of any one image. Everything is alla prima – done in one go. They are whatever they are.

Of course, it’s not only a matter of time – there’s also the kind of sky that happens on a given day.

From the beginning, I was – I think necessarily and even productively – divided. Do you want it fast or do you want it good? It had to be fast or the whole project would break down. It had to be good or there would be little joy in continuing. These two aspects were always in play – in a sort of balance.

Adding this blog – starting in April – intensified the tension.

First, the added steps involved in posting, plus writing, meant more pressure on the available time. Now I needed not only to paint but to cut the painting out of its watercolor block (for example), tape it to a wall for shooting, clean brushes, wash hands to avoid clogging the Nikon with cadmium yellow, adjust lights, shoot, offload, save file, upload, write, and preferably do all of this before everyone in this part of the world had gone to bed – and in time for some dinner! (We have dinner late, so in summer these things collide.)

But second, communicating with you – you know who you are! – also has meant I’m more aware of the qualities of each image.

Until now, I resolved this tension by understanding that the value of the series resided both in the fact that I went out every day and painted the sky and in the way I painted it. If they weren’t of a certain quality, doing them every day wouldn’t mean much. Yet doing them every day imbued them with a sort of message about the passage of the days – a relationship with time.

So, I resolved the tension by not resolving it, because it can’t be completely resolved. I accepted both sides. But the balance can shift. And now I think it has.

At this point, from stage left, enters my brother Steve (a metallurgist by profession, developing materials for aerospace). Then, from stage right, in honor of Bastille Day, a Frenchman, Marcel Proust. More precisely, I’ll bring in one of his translators, Lydia Davis. They helped me see where this was going.

So, at our lunch in Frederick the other day, Steve said something to me that was very similar to the sort of thing people will say from time to time. He really liked the painting of a particular sunset (June 15th) – and then he added something like, “Not that I don’t like them all, but that one seems special.”

I knew what he meant because I often feel the same way. Every so often this everyday process yields something that is more remarkable, in and of itself, as an image.

I think I was ready to hear his comment: I felt I wanted to do more of those kinds of images.

Now, I should preface the following by stipulating that no one who has just finished reading their very first volume of Proust (Swann’s Way, from In Search of Lost Time) should be allowed (1) to comment on it in public, and especially and above all (2) to draw any sort of connection between it and their own work. It isn’t done, and should never be done.

In my defense, I will say that I read it very ... very ... slowly ... over a period of at least six months, almost exclusively on Sunday mornings. And you thought I didn’t go to church.

(I know a couple of people who could read it in one Sunday, but Gillian, Sarah, sorry, hate you both.)

Anyway, I’m not actually going to get into Proust, just the introduction by Lydia Davis, which I read after I finished the book, and which, like Steve’s remark, probably struck me because I was ready for it:

The wistful closing passage [of Swann’s Way] ... introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance, of beloved places and people, and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory, and finally our art. For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus ... the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.

I thought about how I’d often said that the sunset paintings completely submit to time but also suggest something beyond time. I realized (for the first time!?) that one way the sunsets deal with time is by holding back a piece of it.

I had written the following a few days ago, before I read Lydia Davis. I ended up not posting it because it didn’t feel right at that time. But now maybe it does:

When the sun sets, there’s the feeling of understanding where we are, precisely because the sun is leaving us – leaving us exactly – here. There’s got to be a natural desire to follow, to be as timeless as the sun, to stay with it as it dictates time, that Lucky Old Sun.

What I realize, thanks to Stephen L. Van Doren and M. Proust (together again for the first time) (don’t worry, Steve won’t mind that a bit), is that just bravely going forth and painting the sunset every day and occasionally getting a really strong image isn’t enough for me.

To find the timelessness inside time, I need to go for whatever art can get.

I know not every image will work, but ... we’ll see what happens.