The Last Collection by Jeanne Mackin

Author:Jeanne Mackin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

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After the showings, Paris, that city of changing, dappled light, changed yet again, from sultry summer and frantic collections week to autumn. The tourists and buyers left, and the city seemed like a woman who has grown a little wiser, a bit calmer.

I was anything but calm. I was painting furiously, two, sometimes three new canvases a week, barely letting the paint dry on one before beginning another, trying to capture the light in all its variability, the colors on the trees, the mutable river, the clothing of the women, the cold-pinked cheeks of schoolchildren. There was color everywhere, and I was consumed with the need not to repeat it or try to capture it, but to talk with it, to add my own colors to the silent conversation of hue and tint.

The colors almost mixed themselves on the palette; my skies were bluer than blue, the reds shimmered with passion. The lighting in my landlady’s attic was magnificent, and more and more, instead of thinking of scenes, of people walking by the river or a dawn cityscape, the usual paintings made of Paris, I thought only of the colors. I hadn’t been able to finish Allen’s portrait, and lines, specific subjects, seemed not worth painting. The landscapes I tried, the Seine at late afternoon, the grays of Notre Dame’s façade, seemed easy, pretty, no more than souvenirs for tourists. The colors, though, appeared on my canvases in large blocks and ovals.

“But what is it? I see only red and blue,” said Solange, the housemaid who swept my floor once a week in exchange for an English lesson.

“That’s what it is,” I said. “Color.”

“But it must be something else,” she insisted. “A tree. A swimming pond. Two lovers, there in the corner where the blue and the red swirl around together.”

“So you do see more than color.”

She thought about that, biting her lip and leaning on her broom handle.

The day that I finished my first canvas without any representational lines at all took me by surprise. I had meant to sketch in two children playing with a beach ball, but they refused to appear. Instead, there was a blur, a spiral brushed into a splotch of yellow. There were brushstrokes of joy, not children feeling joy. It was the memory of joy.

I no longer dreamed of Allen at night. I no longer woke up with my arms formed into an empty searching circle. It wasn’t forgetting. What I felt for Allen is never forgotten, never finished. But it was an acceptance, both of loss and of a need to take a step forward each day, into the unknown future. The future, like some art, is abstract. We must see what we can in it and accept the unknowing of what is not seen.

And as I was accepting the facts of my life, Paris was unwillingly accepting her own changes. By the end of September, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler had redrawn the map of Europe, surrendering Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s army.

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