Thinking of Bertha as I Gaze at Paul Signac, by Marna Brown-Krausz

The Pine Tree at St. Tropez, by Paul Signac (France) 1909

Thinking of Bertha as I Gaze at Paul Signac

upon viewing The Pine Tree at St. Tropez by Paul Signac
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I must have been eight or nine when I first explored my grandmother’s dressing room, a concave wall of built-in cupboards and drawers shut tight, adorned with transom windows above and tufted benches below.  A long mirror covering the mauve-coloured wall space centered in-between. This was her secret place, and it became my playground. There were spaces just for shoes, drawers for bras and silk panties, and long closets where dresses hung in disarray like tangled tree vines. There I tried on her red spiked shoes (they swallowed my small feet) and her black opera gloves, designed to extend in smooth seduction from each hand to each forearm, instead covering my miniature arms beyond the very top of my imperceptible shoulders. And her ornate fringed shawls of yellow and turquoise that would cover me whole like a wild animal’s skin. Grandma owned many dress slips of differing lengths (do these even now exist?), some white, some black, some in colours I only learned the names of many years later: lipstick red, coral, cornflower and bronze champagne.  
 
She would let me enter this special place, to do what I liked, and I would make my magic there, trying on any piece of clothing I wished, so long as I was careful and made the effort to put back what I had gathered. The room easily filled with sunlight. And I cannot forget the carpet, as it was pink. Not a bright pink or pastel, but a muted maroony pink that you might call a shade of strawberry.  Even the walls of the bedroom she shared with my grandfather were that pink, yes… about the same shade as the carpet below.

Perhaps my grandmother, having learned early that life can shatter you, chose colour so as not to dwell in the dark spaces. Her father had died from tuberculosis when she was 12, or so I remember being told this from some family member (perhaps my grandfather) at a time when I could not fully appreciate the meaning of death.  I did not learn the details of what next happened, other than my grandmother having no choice but to find a job to help the family survive. I know colour can heal us. Colour can be a choice, to restore hope, to make room for delight. My grandparents lived in the house with that wondrous room for more than fifty years. I like to believe that she surrounded herself with rainbows if only to lift her heart high and dull the pain of a childhood she could not enjoy.

As I explore the colours of Signac’s painting, his unnatural world first shocks me. How can there be blue and purple leaves on trees and green scales of sky? What compelled him to rearrange the expected, to reinvent what should be earthy hues: the browns, the muddy oranges, the forest greens, the greys of the world? Perhaps he found some solace in altering his reality. Perhaps, like my grandmother, he experienced the near erasure of all colour from his life, compelling him to recreate what he knew.  And to bring more colour back, to bring it everywhere. To create vibrancy, however and wherever possible. I wished I had asked my grandmother, before she eventually lay shriveled in her hospital bed almost two decades later: why the red so glamorous, why the coral like fire?

Marna Brown-Krausz

​​Marna Brown-Krausz is in Fairfield University's MFA in Creative Writing program, and is a reader for Brevity.