DAILY SUN TIMES

On most evenings you’ll find today’s sunset here. On rare occasions the painting may not appear until the next day or later. In addition to current sunsets, when archiving is completed, you’ll be able to find here every sunset from 2006 through the present, every sunrise of 2006–2007, every sunset from September 1997 through 1998, and hundreds of sunsets and sunrises from 1995–1997. Posting of daily sunsets here began April 16th, 2009. The topic of painting each day’s sunset – ‘the day itself’ – is discussed here.

The Daily Sun Times series dates from June 1995. I painted more than 400 sunsets, plus sunrises and moonrises, between 1995 and 1997 – nine years before the “painting a day” movement is said to have begun. The first completely consecutive series – painting every sunset – began at the fall equinox, September 22nd, 1997. I painted the sunset every day, “in real time,” at 14x18, and continued through 1998. I resumed the series at the beginning of 2006. For two complete years, 2006–2007, I also painted each sunrise. I continue painting every sunset, as I’ve done since January 1st, 2006. The entire collection of more than 3,200 paintings has been kept unbroken; they have not yet been offered for sale.

A calendar archive is currently in the early stages of construction. When finished, it will arrange the paintings by month – for example, all the paintings for September 2006 in one calendar-style array. However, there are still more than 2,500 paintings to be shot, so until we have complete months to show, the paintings that have been shot will be arranged simply by year. You will find more archived paintings as we catch up with the backlog.

Prints of daily sunset and sunrise paintings, along with optional framing and mats, are available here – images can also be ordered as greeting cards.

We’ve started with some of the most recent dates and are continually adding from the archives. 

“Dawn | 20 January 2009” is now available, along with prints of paintings, via the Inauguration Day page. 

BVD (Wm Theo Van Doren) lives near Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife Laura Owen Sutherland and their dog Flint and cats Stokey, Lily, and Pi. Further exciting details and a home photo gallery of sorts will soon be available, we promise.

A biographical sketch can be found here.

Sunset drags streamers over the horizon, pulls air out of the air, burns color down to ash, consuming every last obstacle of atmosphere, displacing place with time, only to kill time with space. It’s the accumulation of incident carried off for distillation. It brings seizures of realization. Not even slightly romantic in itself, it’s the wrap – sweet, sad, or muddled. It’s the truth.

Because it’s the end, it’s the truth.