"Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself." Lucille Ball
This is today's painting from the Met - Rotterdam by Paul Signac, a watercolour painted in 1906 and now stored somewhere in the Met's vaults. It's not on view. Perhaps watercolours fade in the light. But so sad.
Today I think this painting is beautiful - maybe I would not feel the same way another day. Our perceptions of beauty change in a moment. Today when I study it, it seems such a metaphor for life, as well as evoking feelings of calm even though it is so very busy, busy. Joy too.
The boats bustle about in close proximity to each other, the steam puffs from their funnels and from the funnels of the factories on the land behind them, the waves in the harbour are turbulent, stirred up by the boats and the wind. The boats bounce along in the water. It's all almost joyful, full of movement and yet there are small islands of calm.
In the lower centre a lone person rows his boat out into the turbulence behind him. He seems unhurried and one wonders where he is going although somehow or other there is a sense of purpose about him. Going fishing? In a busyharbour? Ditto for the man standing in the boat nearby - he also does not seem very purposeful but then he is heading for home perhaps. Are these two figures metaphors for how we live our lives. We busy ourselves with a purpose or we stand and watch, both attitudes aiming for the same state of calm as modern, frenetic life surrounds us.
The colour scheme however is really what gives the the viewer - well me - a sense of calm - and beauty. This is a photograph of almost the same scene taken at the same time, which also is beautiful and also calm - mostly because the water is flat, and the boats are not moving, but here there is a sense of claustrophobia almost, and gloom. Calm before the storm perhaps.
Signac's painting, like those of many of his contemporaries is predominantly blue, grey and white in particular, with a touch of pale green and violet here and there - all colours which The Times of India - well any interior decorator or psychologist - will tell you 'can create a relaxing atmosphere.' Never mind that those same colours depict the suffocating smoke that polluted towns in the early twentieth century.
Because that's the thing is it not? Beauty can be found in all manner of deadly, grimy and dark places. Beauty is everywhere. If you look.
And calm can be found in busyness. Indeed busyness is soothing. It makes you focus on now. Allows you to forget if only for a moment. When trauma strikes - as it has done a few times in my own life - in all lives - then keep busy. Put one foot in front of the other and keep going. "Gray skies are just clouds passing over" said Duke Ellington. The colours below them still glow and the blue sky, which is always there, will return to view.
Which finally brings me to cooking. During COVID lockdown many people turned to cooking to relieve the stress of not knowing what was going to happen next. We could still go to the supermarket - one of the few places we could still visit. And there on the shelves was food - limited to be true, but bountiful really. There was always something that could be turned into a meal. Turning it into dinner was a satisfying process. A challenge. Bee Wilson, one of The Guardian's food columnists, not only endured the COVID trauma but also endured the ending of a long marriage. She wrote two long articles - and I think a book as well - about how cooking was what saw her through this.
"When you feel you are falling apart, cooking something familiar can remind you of your own competence ... We spend so long in the modern world talking about the stress of cooking that we can miss the ways in which cooking itself can be the greatest of all remedies for stress"
But it's not just the actual cooking. There is the shopping for the ingredients - the anticipation of what one can do with those ingredients and the accompanying excitement of creating something from what is available. The beauty of the ingredients themselves not to mention the release of anger and stress by pounding a piece of meat into submission or chopping an onion, then throwing it into hot fat. There is the physical pleasure of the sounds and smells of food as it cooks. And that's not all of course, because then there's the satisfaction of feeding your family, or even just yourself, with something that at the very least is eatable. Community at the end of the day. Not for those alone of course, but satisfaction nevertheless.
Apologies - a ramble which falls short of its aim. But I did love the painting, It was such a wonderful combination of activity, and calm, beauty amongst industrial gloom. Soothing. Which is not needed today because today is such an obviously beautiful day. Yesterday was not and I might have not seen the joy, the calm, the beauty - the life - in Signac's painting. I was feeling washed out from the effects of a shingles vaccination and had little interest in anything, which was why yesterday's post was little bits and pieces of trivia.
Today I feel better. I walked back from the shops and I shall be making Ixta Belfrage's sensational Fish poached in charred tomato broth, which I was not strong enough to do yesterday, choosing instead to reheat the leftover half quiche of pickled and brown onions with cheese and cornichons. So in a way, I did not follow my instructions to keep busy. I took the other route, of being completely lazy, but then I wasn't traumatised, just weary. And I still felt awful at the end of the day.
Today David reads his Scientific American in the garden, the wattles and blossoms bloom, the sky is blue and even some curious, somewhat drab seeds by the side of the road that I spotted on my walk back from the shops were thought to be beautiful.
"Time is not just about how much or how little we have; it’s about the quality of those minutes and when in the day they fall." Bee Wilson
POSTSCRIPT
So was I traumatised back then, busy, lazy or just happy? August 24
2019 - This club was built for fun
2018 - Nothing on this day
2016 - I don't cook much anymore - now I must have been feeling down on that day.
I too felt really foul after the shingles vax .You bounced back well. Admiration for your blogs always
"I Love Lucy" was the first TV programme I ever watched on a neighbours TV in London in the early 1960's - so your wonderful opening quote from I Love Lucy's star and namesake rang a bright note of optimism for me and the painting echoes it as well. 😄