Oct 27 2009

The Cost of Ultramarine

And suddenly, it just doesn’t matter any more.  Who was wrong, who was right, what caused heartbreak and what is fair.  None of it matters. 

People are painted on a canvas with underpaint, like a Vermeer portrait.  A color underneath that shows through, the foundation for what comes later.  Vermeer painted people with a base of grey.  Not black or white, but grey.  He filled it in with color and light and what appeared to be one color turned out to be combinations of twenty other shades.

My father, like all of us, started out neutral.  He started out on a canvas as the outline of the person he would become, a shape to be filled by whomever held the brush.  Some of us were fortunate to be painted with light and warmth and rich color.  My father was the product of a hasty brush wielded by distracted and harsh people.  I used to look for the different colors that made up my father, searching out subtleties where now I realize there are far fewer than I imagined.  I looked for the light and then decided it was all dark.

It was neither.  Showing through as he ages, I see in him what I know is in myself:  that underpainting of grey.  The same shade, the same basic foundation, the same colors in him flashing through in me, just in different places. 

Vermeer ground lapis lazuli to make ultramarine, the most expensive and exotic shade of its time.  He destroyed a precious stone to make something beautiful, and even when he neared the end of his impoverished life, he continued this extravagance to make his portraits luminous.

I realize now that my father is who he is because nobody really invested anything in making his character extravagant or beautiful.  Now he is sick and in pain, and I can finally see that the person he is doesn’t correspond to the man I painted in my imagination.  He is himself, imperfect but complete.  In my lifetime, he was too busy and damaged to know how to take a precious stone and make it into something beautiful.  He painted us all in basic grey, and relied on us to fill in the rest, either on our own or with the help of others.

I can accept him and make my peace, or continue with regret and bitterness that he didn’t do more.  But in the end, it’s not important; I am more than just grey.  I am layers of color, blended and brushed, formed of sorrow and of joy by the people who have loved me. 

I am so fortunate that in my life, other people who helped shape who I am decided I was worth the cost of ultramarine.

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13 comments on “The Cost of Ultramarine”

  3. this heartfelt essay brought to mind a movie, “a price above rubies”: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120793/

    you just might be able to make your peace with what he could have been, but wasn’t.

    i made my peace with my father, but he contended ’til the day he died, that i wasn’t his child. ten more followed my birth, yet he bonded with only one.

    perhaps your father wanted to be a writer, with a room of his own.

    mine wanted recognition, and applause, but mostly he just wanted his mother to pay attention to him, and his father to notice him. he took it out on us.

  5. A moving metaphor, Mary – you are facing a hard truth with beauty and grace. Understanding that my father was never the god I once believed in, the man who knew everything, was a painful process. I’m not done yet. I still hold his opinion above most all others. And he is still just a man, flaws and all.

  10. I love this piece, Mary. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind, contemplating the colors that I am using on my own children. And the colors their father is using. Such powerful imagery.

  13. A wordsmith is what you are – I spent the day on the phone speaking with my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law. Back and forth over the declining health of my father-in-law.

    This post is perfect timing to remind me what a gem of a woman my sister-in-law is and her mother is too self absorbed to even notice! She is absolutely worth the cost of ultramarine!

    Also a great reminder that parenting is life-long: sometimes the most painful hurts can be inflicted in young adulthood.

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