A memoir that looks at the author's relationships as seen through the art of Claude Monet. The Color of the Sunset makes a gesture toward Impressionism and toward impressions of a life viewed near the end of middle age. Marie Masters successfully braids her own history with Monet's legacy of "beauty, love and light" These two elements contrast each other, creating an energy that wouldn't exist if either were presented alone. For anyone who has ever wondered about life beyond divorce and failed relationships, here is a realistic but hopeful story about trying again. * Explore how relationships factor into life's metamorphosis. * See how art expresses the most fleeting, transformative moments. * Experience the heartache and the bliss of searching for love. "This memoir presents the author's relationships to various men and to the paintings of Claude Monet in thoughtful and interesting ways. Masters awakens insights into herself and courageously reveals some of her own flaws as well" Daniel Minock author of Thistle Journal: And Other Essays

THE Color of the Sunset

By MARIE MASTERS

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Marie Masters
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4685-4967-6

Chapter One

Mardi Gras (c. 1960s & 1970s)

My world before Claude Monet was steel blue. Gunmetal gray. Camouflage green. The color of machinery. My hometown's name, Roseville, was a misnomer, with its harsh square grids of streets and rows of ranch homes. There was no abundance of roses, except in my mother's well-tended garden. I don't remember any significant parks in this bedroom community, except industrial parks with tool shops housing smoke-sputtering machines that sheered metal and extruded plastic into car parts. In nearby Detroit, gray and brown skyscrapers, weather-wasted houses and spray-can art.

Graffiti has its own raw beauty. I've seen it all my life when driving through the city of Detroit. And whenever I take the train to Chicago, the tracks run through a virtual outdoor gallery of colorful words and cartoon-like pictures as we approach Union Station. Wherever I go, graffiti reminds me of home and the notion that art cannot be contained. It can only be expressed.

Early on, I exhibited a talent for excessive art silliness, sketching rabbits with too-large ears and dogs with tongues spastically protruding from their snouts. In grade school, kids sat near me to see what ridiculousness my "art" would render next. Teachers did not appreciate this talent. That familiar clenched jaw look meant I should return to reading about the anti-climactic adventures of Dick and Jane (yawn and stare out the window as the two dreary protagonists played ball with Spot and visited a "real" farm).

Then in ninth grade, my first French class artistically liberated me. I don't recall being introduced to Claude Monet while taking this class with a jet-haired Greek woman named Miss Stamatelos, unless his work graced her disheveled bulletin board. But Miss Stamatelos demanded that I speak French every day and hang onto her every utterance, lest she would lob a chalkboard eraser in my direction. Even under such duress, I managed to create my first work of notable art in her class.

My first English-to-French publication boasted a unique use of construction paper tied together with chunky yellow yarn. Various hues of paper differentiated sections of the rough-hewn booklet. Red and orange pages depicted fashion items clipped from magazines, and captions written in English and French described the pictures. Brown and green paper featured things in nature, such as African elephants and roses, such opposites oddly paired together for no particular reason.

My attempt at a French picture book might not have impressed the likes of Claude Monet, but it did garner third-prize in the Arts and Sciences Fair at Edgar A. Guest Junior High. I never claimed my prize. When the eraser whizzed by my head as Miss Stamatelos announced we had a winner in our midst, I thought the chalk obliterator was intended for someone else's noggin, so someone else must have won. Momentarily, I relished the idea that she missed and felt a small victory.

Then, while looking squarely into my eyes, she angrily growled through her teeth, "Someone in our class won third prize. And had she been at the fair, would have received a ribbon."

There was a ribbon? I didn't know she entered my floppy paged book of many colors. She had suggested my parents take me to the fair, but I was never sure why. I probably found my way to a street baseball game after school on fair day; playing in the street let us dodge cars and thumb our noses at drivers. Mom might have been chasing my cute but active six-year-old sister. And Dad worked 16-hour days at his tool-and-die business. He often ate a plate of eggs for dinner while watching the 11 o'clock news. I doubted he had time.

That same school year, I also took perspective drawing. The art teacher was a tall, fragile-looking man with a four o'clock shadow at eight o'clock in the morning. He expressed intense concern for every pottery ashtray that exploded in his kiln. "You've got to get the air out," he dramatically tsk-tsk'd every time he opened the kiln to find another ashtray fired to smithereens. It was like he had found a dead body. I'm positive this fear of killing ashtrays is what has kept me from pursuing fine arts all these years.

I kept drawing, though. I mean, how much damage could I do with a pencil? Despondent from the pottery we demolished, the same lanky and muttering art teacher who tried to teach us the joys of ashtray sculpture shuffled around the room, looking for pieces of fruit, bottles, boxes, anything that had shape or form. With these everyday items, he constructed the ugliest possible still-lifes. Nothing I drew could improve his blasé compositions. Still, an apple never looked bigger than a bucket or a wine bottle, and for that, I thank him.

It was a middle-school drafting teacher, however, who finally nixed my artistic ambitions. The engineer-turned-instructor hovered like a hornet. We waited for his stinging comments, disappointed hum and accompanying head-shake to show his dislike. I'm convinced that's why people don't sit down and draft. You stand up at attention, waiting for the buzz that surely comes to tell you what you did wrong.

"You're not designing a skyscraper, for God's sake. Just keep the lines smooth and straight," he reminded. "Twirl your pencil. That's it, twirl your pencil so it stays sharp as you run it along the ruler."

I can still draw a straight line, while sharpening a pencil at a ruler blade, with the best of them.

Claude Monet and Impressionism were not yet familiar to me when I reached high school. But like Dorothy searching for her Emerald City, I sought a colorized and fantastical world beyond the rainbows that arched even over the lunch-bucket city of Roseville from time to time. I began craving "the good things."

* * *

By the time I could drive, I couldn't wait to get away from my hometown. Residential homes were tucked in between industrial "parks," a strange reference considering the environmental pollution these businesses created when shaping metal and plastic into parts that fed hungry assembly lines. During the Sixties and Seventies, mom-and-pop businesses (my mother's and father's included) cropped up near such suburbs, so people could escape man-eating factories and work minutes from home in smaller spin-offs of the Big Three automotive factories.

In our neighborhood, homes were built in a few basic designs, the only distinction between them the color of the brick—red, gray, yellow-ish, or pink. There was a nurturing claustrophobia to this cookie-cutter sameness. Once I'd seen a few of my friends' homes, I had seen them all. Most suburbanites were living the dream just by owning one, but it wasn't my dream. I lacked the "go industrial" gene and developed a healthy disrespect for the people who worked with metal and machines just to pay a mortgage. My mother claimed, "You always thought you were better than the rest of us." The truth was that terms like Luxury Sedans, Captains of Industry, and Gross National Product meant nothing to me. I was a kid, and these concepts were too huge for my pea brain.

To escape, I took teenage loner trips in my first car, a dented and dinged Pontiac Bonneville that was more like a boat on wheels. I'd drive to Lexington, a town situated on a stretch of beach located an hour north of Detroit and its suburbs. There I sat on the dock, sketched pictures of driftwood and...