WHEN YOURE done, feel free to come to my house.
If Ive heard that once, Ive heard it 100 times. Its the comment most often tossed at me when Im housepainting.
Housepainting? Yes, I like to paint the walls in the house. Sometimes the fence or the window grates, too.
I dont know why, but I like to paint. Its been this way for decades.
When I told one of my kids the other day that Ive been painting a bit in the office, she said, Sure, I remember you painting the house every year before Passover.
With a bunch of rambunctious kids running around a small Israeli apartment, walls get dirty. I always found it more pleasurable to paint the walls than to clean them with the thoroughness that pre-Passover cleaning requires.
One thing I dont do anymore: ceilings. The neck-craning, back-bending, wrist-twisting, eyeball straining are just too much. Let the professional do the ceilings.
But manipulating the roller, alternatively switching from one end to the other, pressing lightly then heavily, changing from a 1 to a 2 brush as needed, even cleaning and maintaining the brushes I relish it all.
Speak to your local psychologist. What does painting do for me? I dont know. But I find it soothing, and keep coming back to it every couple of years.
To me, the really odd thing is not the mental state, but the physical wonder. I now have a bit of arthritis in my fingers, enough so that my signature is illegible. I just cant control my writing. But these same fingers, when asked to hold a paintbrush, work just fine. When I pick up the brush, the stroke is as smooth as ever. Not only with the right hand, but with left hand. Go figure.
When you paint you notice certain things. Such as: white is not white and black is not black. There are seemingly countless whites. Ultra pure white, inside white, outside white, dimmed white; it goes on and on.
The same with blacks. The next time somebody uses the term its not black and white, well, it sure isnt. There is no such thing as pure white or pure black.
BACK IN a different time, I used to visit Wadi el Joz, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem just a few minutes from where we used to live, in Sanhedria Murchevet, a neighborhood in Jewish Jerusalem. I used to go to Wadi el Joz to get my car fixed by an Arab mechanic. We were pretty friendly. I rather suspect that, for their own safety, Jewish Jerusalemites stopped going there long ago.
Anyway, Mahmoud also painted cars, and used to show me his new technology for mixing paints and coming up with the perfect shade. Wow, when I think of the technology in use today, Mahmouds crude weights and scales were, indeed, crude. Still, the underlying point remains: Painting is a universal pleasure.
Mahmoud took pride in what he was doing, and enjoyed it. So what is it about painting?
Maybe its that humanity wants order rather than chaos a uniform color on a wall, or an attractive pattern on a wall, rather than bumps and shades and textures all jumbled and disordered.
Maybe its the human gift for color. The world is sprinkled, indeed saturated, with infinite shades of color. Maybe inside a home or office, humanity wants to relish the rainbow easel of nature that is outside.
Maybe its the creativity that the increasingly sophisticated technology of paint production affords: shades and combinations never before available at least to the common housepainter.
Or maybe we just want a fresh coat of paint, something new or something different.
The truth is, when it comes to color, we are decades behind the Renaissance. I recall so vividly that when I went to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, in the year 2000 and saw certain paintings of Michelangelo, they almost knocked me over. Although I had seen these paintings in numerous books on very high quality plates, the difference between the original and the reproductions was the difference between (pardon me) black and white.
The way Michelangelo mixed and created his colors is simply a lost art. Astonishingly, the infinitely more intense brightness of his colors is that theyve stayed this way after 500 years!
Michelangelo, Im not. Mixing the paints, I dont (I choose them, but dont mix them). Five hundred years? Im lucky to get a couple of winters or summers out of my humble efforts.
Incidentally, Im not coming to your house.
I dont love painting that much.
Hillel Goldberg may be reached at hillel@ijn.com
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