Seeing color

So it is October.  Fall is setting in.  It's my favorite time of year.  Soon the woods will be ablaze with yellow tulip poplar and hickory leaves.  Specimen maple trees will begin to burn bright red from the top down. Yet even now, before fall's full glory sets in,  I love that sense of nature yielding to the inevitable ebb of life as summer's green gives way to the earth tones of fall.

The other day after Andrew read one of my recent blog posts, he said, "Mom, I would love to see the world through your eyes.  You see beauty everywhere!"  I have to say he's right.  In a word, what I see is color.  The arrangement and juxtaposition of color excites me.  Looking at the world, I think to myself what colors make up this or that?  What is the contrasting color next to it?  In the shadows?  How did God come up with that color?? 

As I mix and swirl pigments around on my palette, my thoughts go to my Granna, my dad's mom.  To be honest, I get my creative genes from both sides of the family: my mom is very artistic and she inherited her eye for beauty from her parents, both of whom had a fabulous Asian-inspired aesthetic sense.  Though my artistic gifts came from all of them, I credit Granna for actually teaching me how to draw.  How to mix colors.  How to see like an artist.

Granna was an oil painter.  She did Impressionist style still lifes and portraits brilliant with color. She'd fearlessly slather paint on the canvas with palette knives.  I don't even know if she ever used brushes.  Like Monet and van Gough, she'd lay one color down after the next, and turn those blobs of paint into vegetables piled on a chair.  Or peonies in an enormous vase.  Or my Aunt Karen in her pretty yellow dress.
 

My family would travel every year to my grandparents' house for Thanksgiving. Granna rarely painted when we visited . . . she was too busy being an amazing Granna.  You know, the kind that always had a cookie jar full of fresh oatmeal raisin cookies for just any old time you felt like eating one.  A big stack of children's books from the library, ready for story time.  Newly repurposed dress-ups salvaged from trunks in the attic.  And best of all, a brand new 64-pack of Crayola crayons and our very own pads of drawing paper set out on the children's project table in the sun room.  She'd give us art lessons if we asked her. And lovingly praise us for our efforts.

So I give thanks to Granna for setting me off on this journey.  She died when I was 18 and never knew the artist I have become.  And yet I like to think she's looking over my shoulder as I paint.  Saying in her soft, age-crackled voice, "Oh, just look at the colors!" the way she always did.  Reminding me to look up, look out at the world.  See with an artist's eye.

Life really is beautiful.