NONFICTION

Blue & Eye

By Madeline Jones     VOLUME 58 No. 1

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1.
Morgan, Peter, and I walk down a flight of stairs to the unlocked two‑bedroom apartment of Peter’s coworker to get wine glasses. Inside the spacious living area is a deep gray sectional, a reclaimed lumber coffee table nestled into the corner of the L. There are tags still on the goldhandled tray resting on the rough wood. On the opposite wall, six small prints with azure backgrounds hang next to the massive T V.

This is a particular blue. A blue I only see in museums.

I open the cabinet next to the stainless steel fridge. There are four wine glasses on the top shelf—a good guess. I put the cool, thin glasses on the counter. I’m surprised by their weight in my hands.

The blue prints catch my eye again. I have to look at these prints, I declare.

The six prints hang in a row on slight angles, in desperate need of a level—all eight by twelve inches, each a variation of the one before.

The black lines gracefully twirl and skate around the center of the paper. A wiry black figure interspersed with organic orbs of tomato-red. A lightly scrawled signature in each bottom right corner reads JOAN MIRÓ.

Holy, shit. Are these real? I ask.

Morgan, a painter, comes over to investigate.

I don’t know. She pauses. They might be.

Peter, are these your coworker’s prints?

No, I think they are his roommate’s—the birthday boy.

The long, bluestone patio on the roof feels like a catwalk. The party gathers in the back corner by the marble island and built-in grill. I can hear laughing from the preppy finance bros clad in Patagonia vests with dark wash jeans and loafers. They throw occasional glances up as we walk closer. The three of us pour our rosé into the expensive glasses and toast to the unimpeded views of One World Trade and Rockefeller Plaza. I think about the prints.

More people arrive, women dressed in skinny jeans and flowy white off the shoulder tops. I count five pairs of apple-red strappy suede sandals.

There is a dress code. Look at the sandals, I whisper in Morgan’s ear.

I look down at my own feet in crimson suede. Mine are chunky clogs with thick straps instead of the skinny two-inch heels.

Oh fuck, I snort. My cheeks flush.

Morgan laughs.

After three glasses of wine and someone’s Montauk beer, I find the owner of the prints. The Mirós are from his parents’ collection, gifted to him last year for his twenty-sixth birthday.

Are they a part of a more extensive collection?

I’m not sure.

What year are they?

My mom might know.

How long have your parents owned them? What other art do they own? What about them do you like? Is Miró your favorite artist?

I just liked the prints growing up.

Do you collect art?

Yeah. A little.

Who?

This artist in Brooklyn. I own a few pieces.

Maybe you can show me sometime.

Yeah. Maybe.

Someone yells over, and he excuses himself before I can ask another question. I turn toward the rest of the party. Yellow light catches the corners of faces that are mostly shadows. Behind the silhouettes, the city glimmers in white lights. Morgan and Peter huddle in the far corner; she whispers something into Peter’s ear. He laughs. I lightly crunch the sides of the empty beer can in my hands.

Over his lifetime, Joan Miró made hundreds of paintings and sculptures and thousands of drawings and prints. The prints in the apartment could be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. Miró’s most famous works sell for millions.

The blue prints remind me of a world I will never see—all of the paintings and drawings and sculptures and photographs and textiles that sit behind locked doors.

I get home to my apartment—empty white walls. Sitting in the dark, I imagine all the Mirós.



2.
The paint company Valspar launches the ad campaign “Color for All” in March 2015 in collaboration with EnChroma, a colorblind correcting eyeglass brand. I find the four-minute documentary introducing the glasses to the market.

White text on a gray background:

CAN YOU IMAGINE LIFE WITHOUT COLOR?

Four interviewees. Keith stopped painting and drawing because colors seemed unidentifiable to him. He thought he was stupid. Atlee was teased for not being able to see pink. Andrew’s children gave him vibrant drawings; to him every color was a variation of gray.

Three hundred million people are colorblind, a condition caused by missing photopigments in their retinas. Commonly, those who are colorblind cannot make a distinction between red and green. The two colors, opposites on the color wheel, look the same.

The cornea and lens focus light onto the retina in the back of our eyes where there are millions of photoreceptors, shaped like rods and cones, which convert the light into electrochemical signals. The signals travel nerve fibers to the optic nerve, which sends signals to our brain. There are three cone photopigments which allow us to see a full spectrum of color.

All four interviewees are given silver-framed glasses with gray-tinted lenses.

They walk into a large industrial room with a bright thread installation: hundreds of thin strings in neon purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, and blue strung between two wooden beams, creating a large, twisted prism. Their mouths hang open as they slowly circle the sculpture. They point to the colors they see for the first time. Tears well in the corners of their eyes. All of them get quiet.

The documentarians show Andrew his children’s drawings and show Atlee five shades, including a pink she’s never seen before. I hang on her comment: I can’t see the world like the way other people see the world. My body rushes cold. Atlee wipes her face looking at the paint swatches without the glasses. It’s just dull. When Andrew takes off his glasses, everything is flatter. I don’t want to take them off, he says. Now I wipe my eyes, hoping none of my coworkers can tell I am crying at my desk.

There are hundreds of YouTube videos of people putting on EnChroma glasses and seeing the whole color spectrum for the first time. These videos do not have elaborate art installations or rainbow sunsets. The home videos are in driveways or backyards; some are indoors, but the reactions are all the same. Pure awe. Some of the videos are even titled, “Try Not to Cry Challenge.” EnChroma glasses help separate colors, so most consumers express a change in vibrancy. The world becomes rich, and hues are bright. Colors are distinct. EnChroma glasses retail for around $349 and are not covered by insurance.

I never considered the price of seeing color.



3.
Age eleven.

My mom gives me a construction-orange fleece from Lands’ End. Pink was my previous favorite color, but my mom made a correct prediction. Pink was passé. Orange was in. The fleece becomes my safety blanket. I wear it over my uniform to and from school. I keep it with me everywhere I go, even in the summer for over-air-conditioned restaurants and freezer aisles of the grocery stores—my skin prickles in the cold.

The fleece feels best when I’m getting into our sunbaked car in the middle of July. The nubby and spongy fabric feels like the color of the jacket. A vivid warmth envelopes my little body, while pool water drips down the back of my neck from my wet hair. My mother sweats in the front seat. The AC blasts.

Maddie, aren’t you hot?



4.
My glasses fog as I walk into the Guggenheim. I can make out the haze of the famous white Spiral beyond the shape of the security guard checking my bag. I walk cautiously toward the center of the main entrance where I know my friend and her mother wait for me. I recognize Paige’s tall skinny outline. She wraps me in a hug.

Ahhh, I can’t see, I say.

I see that, Sweets.

The outer edges of my glasses begin to clear.

The Spiral is closed for installation. This is a rare opportunity to see the museum at work. We purchase discounted tickets and make our way up the white staircase to a second-floor gallery that is still open. I skim the introduction on the wall and take off after bright green and orange paintings interspersed with black-and-white photography from the thirties to the sixties. The paintings are all color studies of the same adobe house with two windows. Mexican architecture and color are Josef Albers’s specialty.

I don’t get it, says Paige.

I try to explain the variations, but she is not interested.

I stop at the entrancing series of paintings of squares in warm colors from Albers’s signature series “Homage to the Square”. Albers painted over a thousand versions from 1950 until his death in 1976. All of them are similar in layout and process: three to four nested squares positioned toward the bottom of the canvas. I like the orange and red variation: garnet in the center, tangerine in the middle, and burnt-orange on the outside.

A sign on the gallery wall reads, LIKE A COMPOSER WRITING VARIATIONS ON A SINGLE MELODIC THEME, ALBERS CREATED COUNTLESS COLOR COMBINATIONS IN WHICH THE EFFECT OF THE INDIVIDUAL COLORS CHANGES MARKEDLY FROM WORK TO WORK, DEMONSTRATING THE VARIABILITY OF OUR PERCEPTION OF COLOR.

The combination of the three hues creates new values, new emotions, different from the experience if the colors were separate. The tangerine points to the burnt-orange, and the burnt-orange leads into the garnet, which has changed the definition of the tangerine shade in between.

The Interaction of Color: an illusion is created when the square in the center takes on the hues of its neighbors. The value and effect of an individual color change from work to work depending on the color’s proximity to and interaction with adjacent colors.

Each color exists because of the others.

How is color preference learned? Do the colors in my life influence future colors, like the way Albers’s colored squares influence each other? For me, the origins of color preference are more organic, like little memories ricocheting from the past.

I lean into the bright.

The short, one-shouldered, fuchsia prom dress. The mossy-green walls in the family room. Western red paint in the basement. Pink floral wallpaper growing in my bedroom. The lacquer orange music stand.

My grandmother Ba loved color; her body often drenched in loose hot-pink shirts or lime-green linen. When she wore black, which was frequently, ruby lipstick became the pop of color. On Ba’s nightstand was a small clear bag, my uncle’s ashes, mixed with glitter and tied with a pink satin ribbon.

Maybe this was all predetermined.



5.
I am at the Guggenheim again, this time for an exhibition celebrating Wassily Kandinsky. A scarlet Alexander Calder mobile turns delicately in the center of the Spiral. All of the colors and patterns feel familiar from a Kandinsky retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum I saw a few months ago. In my photos of the Guggenheim that day, everything includes some shade of red.

Red. Red. Red. Red.



6.
Thousands of burnt-red terra-cotta roofs dot the tops of Istanbul’s buildings cascading down to the Bosporus. Bright-cherry tulip patterns climb and weave on slick Iznik tiles that cover gleaming blue mosques. Red-orange stripes decorate archways. Charred-red piles of spices in burlap bags sit in the market. Thousands of warm-colored lanterns hang in shops. Yards of rugs with red backgrounds lie in the Grand Bazaar. In every photo, I wear a red raincoat. Everywhere I visit, Turks stare at my red hair. Red is familiar in Istanbul, and it is magnificently foreign.

We take a river tour up the Bosporus one morning. It is raining the kind of rain that spits sideways on the water. The boat reaches a stretch of estates.

Yalı in Turkish means “sea mansions.”

The baroque mansions stand next to one another on the water’s edge. This is some of the most glamorous and coveted real estate in Istanbul. We chug past a blaring ruby home. The wooden Ottoman design is three stories covered in long vertical windows with delicate crown molding. The color is shocking next to the row of dark green trees and houses of whites and creams. The red is more purple than orange—a pomegranate red.

A man in a yellow shirt stands on a small walkway between the home and the river. I like the contrast of his shirt against the home. I want to know what his is like. What sits inside the bright walls.



7.
In fifth grade, I cannot see the chalkboard or the blackboard or the greenboard. So, I get glasses. My best friend, Taylor, has glasses. She wears dorky rec spec goggles in gym class and soccer games. They leave a deep pink imprint on the bridge of her nose, trailing off under her eyes. My vision is barely off 20/20, but my right optic nerve is a bit larger than the left. Normally, both optic nerves are the same size. The doctor notes the asymmetry in my chart.

We will watch this as you age, says the optometrist.

Our optic nerves have over a million nerve fibers like minuscule wires, which together become strong, healthy. When the fibers die, they create blind spots in your vision—little black holes. You don’t notice the blind spots until the majority of the nerves die. When all of the nerves die, you go blind.

I feel a specific type of giddiness putting on my glasses for the first time, unaware of the permanence. My portrait forever altered. Outside the car, the dark-green leaves are clear again, rustling in the wind, down Lake Drive. I forgot what vividness is like from a distance. All I want to do is see.



8.
I often confuse indoor photos of the Oculus, in New York City, and the Art Museum, in Milwaukee. The architect Santiago Calatrava designed both buildings, fifteen years apart. They have resounding similarities: vaulted white repeating beam structures that emulate elegant ribs and minimalist wings.

The Milwaukee Art Museum has external wings, the Burke Brise Soleil, that open and close every day. The elegant pearly pavilion sits on Lake Michigan like a boat docked on the water or perched like a seagull ready to take flight. Calatrava’s modern Gothic cathedral.

The Oculus in New York has the familiar patterns of glass and white support beams arching and repeating overhead. Shadows from the vaulted beams create stripes on the marble floor. Again, its form imitates wings, but this structure is motionless, like a bird stuck mid-takeoff in a photo, its wings extended up and back. The white interior and windows bring in light with such clarity—a prayer for the in-transit.

Both projects opened significantly over budget, a recurring criticism that Calatrava receives on nearly all of his projects. In 1997, the Milwaukee Art Museum project was estimated at $38 million but in 2001 at opening, totaled $122 million. The Oculus cost $4 billion, which is twice the original budget. As Esquerra Unida, a left-wing party in Valencia frustrated by the mounting costs of the City of Arts and Sciences development—who were later sued for defamation—put it, “Calatrava bleeds you dry.”

On one of his first trips to Milwaukee, Calatrava notices a massive, forty-foot Alexander Calder mobile lost in the industrial ceiling of the Mitchell International Airport. The large circles of red, black, and blue were stagnant in the air. What is this doing here?

The Calder turns slowly in the front entrance. In the lighting of the Milwaukee Art Museum that afternoon, my mother’s green eye pops against her fair, freckled skin. Subtle crow’s feet kiss the corners of her eyes. My mother has a blue eye and a green eye. Her left. Her right. The difference is nearly invisible until she wears green or blue tops.

We walk toward Isola di San Giacomo in Palude Chandelier II, a Dale Chihuly sculpture. A thin metal stand holds up swirls and spirals of orange, red, and blue blown glass in an exploding pineapple shape. At the top, the delicate pieces thin and elongate like snakes dancing toward the sky. Chihuly created this sculpture from the leftover scraps of a massive installation series in Venice, Italy, in 1996. The piece is nicknamed, “The End of the Day.”

My mom pulls out a few pipe cleaners from her tote bag. She hands me a red one. We twist them to mirror the glass structure. When I have a school group, I’ll hand out pipe cleaners to the kids. They love it, and I see other docents copying me all the time, she says with a smile.

Until my mom began the docent-training program at the Milwaukee Art Museum two years before, I thought art was my thing. Drawing comes naturally to me—the floral pastels in grade school, the advanced mixed-media art classes in high school, and eventually, a minor in figure drawing in college. On family trips, I am the one insisting on visiting art museums. I forget that my mom was always with me. I have been too literal about my mom’s relationship with art. It is visible, but I was more concerned about seeing my art, not hers.

Yes, my artistic inclination was nature, but it was also nurture. There were the cartoon bunny drawings at restaurants with primary crayons and white paper place mats. Hundreds of flower arrangements I watched my mom perfect at our kitchen island. Our home, meticulously styled with her warmth and charm. The antique teacups turned into candles and cake centerpieces made from carnations that my mom created for my cousin’s bridal shower.

My mom guides me to a second-floor gallery with endless views of a frozen Lake Michigan and, also, a new acquisition, Rainbow Bridge by Olafur Eliasson. The sculpture plays with light, color, and perspective. Twelve glass orbs rest on black steel rods at eye level. Each sphere depicts a color of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, aqua, blue, indigo, indigo-violet, violet.

Olafur Eliasson (Danish, b. 1967), Rainbow Bridge, 2017, Painted and mirrored glass with powder coated steel.

The sculpture looks like stick people standing together, their arms creating one long line, connecting all of their shoulders. My mother explains that the iron rods model the geometry of a bridge.

Depending on your location in relation to the sculpture, the orbs reveal clear, black, a color, or a combination of two. On one side of the sculpture, you can only see black or clear; the colors are not visible. You move to the next side, and the rainbow appears. On the opposite side, like a snake eye, slits contain the colors, but the rest of the orb is black. On the last side, you can see your reflection upside down in color.

The artist describes the spheres as “unstable, slipping between clarity, color, and blackness in response to the slightest movement of the viewer.”

Which color is your favorite? my mother asks.

Oh, this orange one. I pause. Or maybe the red.

I like all of them. I imagine the glass orbs are cold in this gallery; their surface is slippery as well.

“Slipping” versus “slippery.”

My colors aren’t stable. My preferences collide into one another like the color wheel turning around and around, progressing into the adjacent. I like the way paint slips on my fingers eventually to cake and harden on my skin. Or the way drops of paint look in the sink after washing brushes. The crisp edges of perfect circle blobs turn wispy from water, colors twisting.

The Art Museum only has half of the funds for the sculpture. They need to raise the rest of the money to finish purchasing the piece. This is new for me: an art museum asking for money in the gallery.



9.
I stare at the dim innards of the machine, gray-white and smooth. The button under my right hand feels similar to a computer mouse, except there is a small circular indentation for my pointer finger. The pinprick lights begin to appear in flashes around my eye, first in the center then all over my peripheries. My eye strains from tape pulling back my eyelid. My hands grow sweaty.

Okay, almost done, says the technician.

The blue-white flashes continue. My eye burns. The last light flashes. I can close my eyes and blink normally. The test starts all over again for my left eye.

After years of monitoring my optic nerves, my eye doctor finally orders a series of field-vision tests when I am twenty to determine if any parts of my ocular tissue are damaged. Asymmetrical optic nerves can be an indication of glaucoma.

My eye doctor points to a small patch of black dots on a grid on the flimsy white paper in his hand. This is a small blind spot in your vision. You do not notice it because it is slight, but it is something that our machine sees. I’m going to refer you to a glaucoma specialist for further testing.

Okay, I respond, unsure of the questions I should ask. My ears start to ring. Losing my vision is too abstract.



10.
The first boy I kiss has piercing cornflower-blue irises. Eye contact is easy. Hypnotic. We meet in the Traverse City Airport, but he says he doesn’t remember, delirious from a twenty-hour journey from Hawaii to an arts camp in northern Michigan. After three weeks of holding hands and wandering camp, we kiss behind the dance building, on the squishy beach of Green Lake in Michigan. I close my eyes. His eyes close too. Saliva slick skin, fumbling tongues.



11.
Sight exists because of waves. We see the differences in light, like hearing high and low pitches. A frequency corresponds with sounds, the vibrations in a given period. Color vision is like a piano. The keys on the left create low-frequency sounds and rise as you move to the right, as the pitches get higher. Each color corresponds with a wavelength of light. Reds have long waves. Blues have short waves. Each key matches a color.



12.
The first person I met with glaucoma is a clarinet teacher at the same summer camp. His glasses look like Coke bottles.

I wonder how many times my teacher flinched at the tonometry test. The machine sends a puff of air into your eye to measure the intraocular pressure. It is not physically painful, but it is jolting. Your whole body lurches. It’s like when a raindrop hits you square in the eye. I could never keep my forehead pressed to the cold white headrest. The anticipation of the puff makes me wince. It takes four tries for the device to finally get a read on my eye.

I never wear my glasses when I play the clarinet. The chin tilts down slightly to keep air in line with the instrument, so the eyes have to peer over the top of the glasses up at the podium. The conductor is fuzzy. The up and down of clear music and hazy waving arms is dizzying.

My teacher memorizes all of his music.

Maybe your ears get better and your tongue gets faster and all the small muscles in your fingers get more control. The eye drops. The extra-large music. You figure it out, or you quit.



13.
Option one. The slow drain. “The silent thief of sight.”

Fluid builds up in the front part of the eye. This extra pressure damages the optic nerve, killing those small little fibers one by one. Slowly. Painlessly. Glaucoma starts at your peripheral vision. Your area of vision becomes smaller and smaller, literal tunnel vision. You can still see the world, but your perspective is small. It is permanent.

Option two. The blocked drain. “Closed-angle.”

Pressure rises fast because the iris blocks the draining fluid. Blurred vision. Mild headaches. Eye pain. It’s too late to save the eyesight when you see halos and rainbows.



14.
Raoul Dufy (French, 1877–1953), Red Orchestra (Le concert rouge), 1946–49, Oil on canvas.

One of my mother’s favorites. One of my favorites. A familiar situation. I am the orchestra—my mother, the audience. My mom points this out.

Slow look: a practice of looking at a piece for a prolonged time, usually ten to fifteen minutes. The patron is invited to experience the work without any guidance of a docent. The hope is the piece will unfold on its own and the viewer will come to truths about the work and themselves naturally.

It is an active meditation on art. You let the colors and the pencil marks take you on an adventure. Your eyes scan every inch, and you see things you have never noticed before. You can get close, and you can stand far away, but you have to stay with the painting. Even for the most basic and simplistic work, there are layers, but you have to be patient enough to find them.

The irony is I do not particularly enjoy slow looks. My mother does.



15.
Eyes are like cameras.

1. The light reaches the eye.
2. Cornea. It focuses the light.
3. Aqueous Humor. The liquid keeps the pressure constant.
4. Pupil. The central opening in the iris. It decides how far the light goes in.
5. Lens. The camera’s focus.
6. Vitreous. The light goes into the deep center, the clear jelly.
7. Retina. The film. The photoreceptors.
8. Brain.



16.
My best friend, Kate, confesses a purchase her father made a few years ago—a small fifty-thousand-dollar sketch by Rembrandt. Her parents were on a cruise when he saw it in the silent auction.

Where is it in their house? I ask.

In the bedroom, but my mother hates it. The piece means nothing to my dad.

It means something if he bought it, I say.

My dad likes the idea of owning something big like that. Like he’s a part of that community, but he knows nothing about the sketch or Rembrandt.

Kate’s parents encountered unanticipated financial trouble shortly after purchasing the Rembrandt. Her mother wants the Rembrandt sold for the savings, but her father refuses.

Kate, what does the painting look like?

Ugh, it’s a sketch, not a painting. Honestly, it’s nothing special.

I try to imagine it. A Rembrandt. Nothing special.

Well, will the value increase? I mean, your parents could always sell it if they needed the money.

My mom wants it gone. She hates everything it represents.

Weeks later, Kate’s mom took the Rembrandt off their bedroom wall and put it in the living room where she did not have to look at it regularly.



17.
I go to the Whitney Museum of American Art to see the retrospective of Los Angeles-based painter Laura Owens. I am late for the docent tour, but I catch the last fifteen minutes. The tour crowds in a middle room in front of a large painting of a muted forest scene; the docent points out the storybook influences: the small curious monkeys tucked in tree limbs and small bright-blue butterflies against the light earthy tones.

Staring at the monkey, I remember my mom showing me a triptych by Owens in the Milwaukee Art Museum. The panels were much smaller than the one in front of me and represented spring, autumn, and winter. There is a point where patterns emerge in museums, the canon of artists, besides the obvious classics, converge, and you understand who is included and who is not. When you move to different cities, it can feel like art is following you.

We shuffle into the next gallery with seven large panels: each nine by seven feet spread out on three walls. The paintings are collages of clean lattice designs with layers of candy-red gingham and scans of newspaper classifieds. There are whooshes of fuchsia and neon-pink paint. On the top layer are large brushes of chunky dark-blue and black paint that depict letters of the word karaoke. Owens used spray paint under blocks of brushstrokes to create drop shadows. I have to look at the edge of the canvas to confirm that the painting is only 2D.

On the center wall in the gallery is a large gap: a missing painting. The panel sold at Sotheby’s for $1.7 million a few weeks ago, and the curators left that space blank in case the owners would be so kind and lend it to the museum for the rest of the exhibition. Laura Owens only works in series. Looking at the giant color-filled panels, it feels wrong to split any of them apart, but that is not the point of her work. Whether these paintings are hung in the series or scattered in galleries and private collections across the world, they are always in the conversation. Each panel is one piece of the story, but each can stand alone. Still, I am angry.

I don’t know how to answer these questions about art and ownership and money. They make me want to pull out my hair and howl in frustration. But I’m not going to do that in this pristine well-lit gallery of the Whitney Museum.

I grab one of the exhibition catalogs set into the sleek gray benches in the center of the gallery. I flip to Pavement Karaoke. Inside is a photo of the first showing in 2012, with all of the panels together. I look back up at the paintings in front of me and back down at the photo. I feel like the space on the wall.



18.
The eye is difficult to explain. Even Darwin struggled with its place in evolution. It’s too delicate. Vulnerable.

“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.”
—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species



19.
I am naked on my couch, just out of the shower. The bearded old man in the Robert Burkert print is watching me.

My aunt gave it to my parents as a wedding gift. I found it in the basement, so I took him with me to Chicago and eventually to New York. The glass keeps breaking in the frame.



20.
There are mirrors in the Laura Owens exhibition in a room with orange and brown honeybee furniture. We can only see the front part of our eyes; the rest is hidden. But eyes are asymmetrical globes—nearly an inch in diameter.



21.
Clear vision stops five inches from my face. The world blurs into fuzzy shapes and colors. I do not have great vision, but I do not have glaucoma.

You know, some people have asymmetrical optic nerves and nothing comes of it, which is the best outcome.

We can plan for the unpredictability, like an artist letting their paintbrush run before them. I trust the organic.

Pink, orange, lime green, red, chartreuse, marigold. My colors shift all the time, forward and back. Color patterns are visible at certain points in my life. The Oranges. The Blues. The Greens. The Reds. Now, the Yellows.



22.
George Rodrigue, Spring Adds Color to My Life, 2014, Silk screen.

My father surprises my mother with a George Rodrigue Blue Dog print for Mother’s Day. My mom displays her Blue Dog in the spring above the honey-stained mantle in our family room. I picture her styling the room with springtime vignettes, little figures of flying pigs, birds, and bunnies. Other times during the year, the print is swapped out for Christmas wreaths, Halloween decorations, and other paintings from friends and family.

George Rodrigue gained global recognition in the nineties when his Blue Dog paintings starred in an Absolut Vodka print ad campaign. The French-Cajun folklore loup-garou, a werewolf, inspired the Blue Dog series. Cajun life in New Orleans inspires all of Rodrigue’s work.

Absolut Rodrigue, 1993, one of three paintings created by George Rodrigue for Michel Roux and Carillon Importers, Ltd.

I am twelve when my family visits my aunt and uncle’s bright-orange house in San Francisco for a week. I see a Blue Dog painting for the first time. Up their stairs to the lime-green living room is a massive canvas of a blue dog, my Aunt Anna Beth’s painting of Rodrigue’s work. It is a good imitation, vibrant and brushy like Rodrigue’s paintings, and a smart way to have one in her home, instead of an original, which sell for five figures. I lock eyes with the painted dog at the top of the stairs; her bright yellow eyes are playful and happy.

My whole family adores these paintings. Rodrigue’s books peppered my house, and I loved flipping through the glossy pages and reading about Rodrigue’s dog Tiffany, who also inspired the Blue Dog. I painted my own copies, trying to master Rodrigue’s overlapping of thick paint and blending of blues. My Blue Dog, but in pinks and oranges, sits on my mother’s bookshelf.

I have not seen any Blue Dog paintings in a museum or at one of the Rodrigue galleries. But I know Miró uses a blue similar. Miró’s work is delicate up close with gestural black lines; his work is flat but dimensional; the colors are more washed and contained. Rodrigue’s acrylic paintings are brushy and wet. The blues are blending in and out of darks and lights in streaks of paint. His Cajun paintings are moody and mysterious and inviting. I want to see the texture. Get so close I can smell the acrylic.

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MADELINE JONES is a Brooklyn-based writer originally from Milwaukee. Jones graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with an MFA in creative nonfiction. Jones’s essay, “Frisson,” was the runner-up in the Boulevard 2022 Nonfiction Contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road Magazine, Peatsmoke Journal, and Third Coast Magazine. Jones is working on a collection of essays exploring her relationship to music, art, and the body.


VOLUME 58 No. 1