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.