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Chaotic Simplicity Part 2--Matisse and my Mom
After my first meeting with a clerk from the local Quaker meeting, I started thinking about what it means to live a simple life. Can you have simplicity with a lot of colors in it? My favorite painters are Matisse and Kandinsky. I need color, but not much else. Addressed here.
One of my favorite books by the astonishing A.S. Byatt, one of my favorite writers in life, is the set of three short stories called The Matisse Stories. All three stories involve fairly mundane events in the lives of women---the first, for example, is about a middle-aged woman who gets a haircut she loathes and ends up more or less laying the whole shop to waste; and can't we all identify with that?---but at the center of each story is one of Matisse's paintings.
This was a painter who understood color and was unafraid of it. I know nothing about art, and I don't remember the names of specific paintings, but I knew the first time I saw a painting by Matisse that I had discovered someone whose vision of the world matched my ideal of it. That's not well put, but I don't know how else to explain it. He painted 'voluptuous luxury' but that isn't what I see. I barely take in the subjects of his paintings; to me it's the arrangement of blocks of color---the oranges, pinks, greens, and purples, pure and vibrant. I love the orderly arrangements; that the patterns they form happen to resolve into recognizable objects has always seemed to me to be merely a happy accident. It's the colors that I love.
I don't even understand the sort of brain that prefers minimalist color schemes, though some of my nearest and dearest very much do. Those spaces, however elegant, feel empty and sterile to me. Black, white, beige, brown, grey, ecru, white, or any neutral is to me simply a background on which to impose large blocks, whorls, and swirls of color. I love the saturated Matisse tints best, but I won't say that the greyed-down shades of plum, olive, soft teal, and slate blue don't have their own appeal. The director of my department, who loves Italian color, painted her whole office in a rich deep red, not quite rust-colored and not quite blood-colored, but somewhere in between. Like terra cotta to the 10th power. When I get a little tired or tense during departmental meetings, I get stimulation from looking round and absorbing tawny-toned Italian color.
I got my love of vibrant color from my mom. She has always filled her house with color, even during periods when it wasn't at all the style. She painted the walls of my room at home apple-green, and I don't mean the pastel sort (we both loathe watered-down tints), but the sort you see in Charleston or Williamsburg (which is where she got her inspiration). Against that, a vibrant blue rug, indigo or her personal favorite, 'cobalt.' If it sounds awful, I can assure you that she pulled it all together with the curtains and the bedspreads. She choose green because I loved green but her own favorite color schemes center around teals, aquas, cobalts, intense yellows, and a color she calls 'fuschia' and I call magenta. Like me, she collects glass---though hers is fine glass and mine is whatever shines brightest on the shelves of the flea market---and has shelves of it in a magnificent lighted case she refers to as her 'Christmas tree.'
"Someday I want you to have all this," she says to me. Aside from the fact that I never want that day to arrive, I doubt I will ever have the sort of living space that could accommodate these large and lavish pieces. And I don't need them---I have my shelves of flea market glass on the shelves beneath the window sill where they catch the light surprisingly effectively She's passed on to me her love of color and for that I'm more grateful than I can say.
RELATED POSTINGS
“Infinite & Unforeseen.” The Cathars, the Quakers, T.S. Eliot, & Me
Chaotic Simplicity
Quaker Meeting
Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.
7:05:19 AM 
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