Sunset, Tuesday, 1 December 2009

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

Today is my friend Sarah Bruce’s birthday. Not sure about her age, except it’s somewhere under 40. Anyway, usually – in fact, always – Sarah, who controls the weather on her birthday because she’s some form of witch, contrives to deprive me of any sort of skyscape on December 1st except for a clear cold blue sky and that’s it, no clouds, no other color, thanks very much.

I guess this year she relented. I want to thank her for the sky.

Sarah moved north from here to be closer to Salem, I guess. If this sort of thing interests you, you might check out her blog, I Nap, Therefore I Am a Witch.

Around a week ago I posted a little item about the cover of The New Yorker and its image of a pumpkin pie – and a ‘pumpkin cloud’ – by Wayne Thiebaud and I made a wild guess that the original painting might run you $75,000. Now, thanks to a link in the blog emdashes, I’ve seen some of the actual prices for which Thiebauds have sold recently. Did I say last week that $75,000 was probably way, way off, on the conservative side? Well, out of some 30 Thiebaud paintings at what seems to be a sort of meta–auction site, I did manage to find one that had gone dirt cheap for $62,000 – and all the rest, forget about it.

In fact, speaking of pumpkin, a Wayne Thiebaud of slices of the pie sold for $1,900,000.

If you’d like to get in on the pop art action, but didn’t start saving 30 years ago, you can buy a Mike Fitts now and thank me later.

Sunset, Sunday, 22 November 2009

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

I experienced an uncharacteristic twinge of jealousy when I saw that the cover of my November 23rd issue of The New Yorker featured a “Pumpkin Cloud” – a luminous and shadowed cream-like cloud hovering over a mound of whipped cream in the middle of a pumpkin pie. Like so:

In discussing how this lovely apparition made it to the cover of The New Yorker, I said to Laura, “Well, it’s a Wayne Thiebaud.” Then, although I just made this up and it may be way, way off (on the conservative side), I added, “The original of that will cost you $75,000.”

I’ve only ever sent them one cover, a tree with eight suns in its bare branches, for which I got a nice pat on the back from the art director. I’ll freely admit I’d love to get a cloud on the cover – any kind of cloud – a pumpkin cloud, a sidewalk subway vent cloud, a cloud from the stack of QE2 arriving in the harbor, a Staten Island landfill garbage fume cloud, a butternut squash cloud – I don’t care. Maybe someday.