Sunset, Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.This by all rights (or maybe I should say by almost all rights, since I clearly didn’t comply) should be a silver-gray painting belonging to a day of rain from morning til night. The sunset sky was silver, gray and white in billows and shreds rising from lower left to upper right.

Out today with Flint, in the afternoon, the silver light filtered through the trees made the woods seem like a luminous room, everything so easy to see, the greens especially, running cedar on the dark floor, new beech leaves beneath the ceiling. Rain seemed to carry light down with it. The calm, even glow made me think of the atrium in the old wing of the National Gallery of Art, with its skylights and water pool.

When we came out of the woods into the big field Laura and I call the Gobi Desert – a lush green oval one-third by two-thirds of a mile, so named for the experience of crossing it on a thick hot summer day when you’ve already walked five miles – it was simply a much, much bigger, softly lighted silver room. 

Walking today was more like wading, thanks in part to the rain but also because of the tall uncut grass.

Then, when it was time to paint, I knew that the color I was seeing could best be described as Davys gray and white, but I was impelled to try something different. Without knowing why, I worked brown-pink, radiant violet and sepia into my initial white layer, then painted Davys and titanium white over that. It’s not literally the color but perhaps sometimes to get a certain color or a certain light, it’s best not to match color for color and light for light.

I was happier, at any rate, than if I had simply painted gray. And it just started raining harder.