Guaranteed All-New Clouds for the New Year – Sunset, Tuesday, 1 January 2013

William Van Doren, GUARANTEED ALL-NEW CLOUDS FOR THE NEW YEAR. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

One for One One – Sunset, Sunday, 1 January 2012

William Van Doren, ONE FOR ONE ONE. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Four Aces (Sunset, Saturday, 1 January 2011)

William Van Doren, FOUR ACES (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

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.