Color

Since early childhood I have loved colors, bright vivid colors as in a sunset and pale delicate colors as in a peony. There are very few colors I don’t like, e.g, a harsh red-violet, and feces-brown. When I was a little girl living with my mother and father in Mount Lebanon, a semi-rural suburb of Pittsburgh, PA, my most treasured possession was my package of crayons.  I made colorful wardrobes for paper dolls who looked like Dolores Del Rio, the only movie star who had black hair like mine. She was tall and slim, as I hoped to be.  My mother, who was a young lawyer and the breadwinner for our little family in those depression days when my father was unemployed, never noticed what I was doing. Nor my father, except when he told me to clean up the scraps of paper, scissors, and crayons lying around on the blue Persian rug in our dining room.  When I forgot to do that, which happened frequently, I was sent upstairs to my room as a punishment.  Mother always said, “Oh, Henry!  She is so young….” to no avail.  But my Granny in Teaneck, NJ loved my paper dolls.  She used to say, “How can you make such tiny shoes, hats and purses?”  So, I sent the paper dolls to her home at 192 Grayson Place in Teaneck, NJ.

I remember one color that I really treasured. Not one of those bright, sunset colors, but a pale pink skin color.  It was given to me by an old lady living next door, the landlord’s wife, who was dying of cancer.  She must have seen me making my paper dolls.  I treasured it  long after she had died.  I kept using it until I could no longer grasp it with my little fingers.  I’ve been taking art classes, painting with acrylics and tempora paints, and making mixed media collages since 1955.  

I also loved to use color in interior decorating.  I decorated my tiny single room in Stockwell Hall at the University of Michigan when I was 18 years old, and all of my subsequent homes in Oslo, Berkeley, Detroit, San Francisco and Davis.  I like Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea of bringing the outside in and the inside out, to make the home become a part of the environment rather than a fortress in which to hide. 

I have tried to do that in our Davis home, in which we have lived for 54 years.  Our house is on College Park where the huge old trees form an arch over the street.  From every window we see profuse greenery.  In the Sun Room downstairs, the full-length glass doors look out on pools and a tree-enclosed garden.  It is an eastern exposure, flooding the room with light.  When you enter our house, you have a view of the garden. For our bedroom upstairs I chose a silvery wall paper with a tree motif. Very soothing and restful. 

I am now 95 years old and almost blind in one eye.  I still love colors as much as ever.  I hope I will die before I lose my eyesight altogether.  I can’t live in a colorless world.