Sunset, Wednesday, 9 September 2009

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

You can think Canaletto, you can think Giorgione, you can think Cassatt, Sisley, Kahlo, Hiroshige or Poussin. You can think Turner (some may find it odd that I don’t – this is probably because I ‘discovered’ him, as in really noticed his amazing work, only very recently) or Whistler or Munch or de Kooning or O’Keeffe. Doesn’t matter. If you have any integrity at all, when you get a brush in your hand sooner or later you’ll just paint, and there probably won’t be a whole lot you can do other than paint like yourself.

Sunset, Wednesday, 19 August 2009

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

In the vast museum gallery of the woods, walking with Flint, the sun through cloud cover skylight, I see art in reverse – Courbets and Corots, Constables, Sisleys, Homers and Sargents before they became these things. They started here, somehow. Even the most visionary Cézannes, the O’Keeffes, Dalis, Kandinskys, Rothkos, Warhols, Hockneys: What a room ...

Flint stops to drink from a stream, in the museum cafeteria.