As an Art Major I don't care for art history very much. I never have. It's not that I don't heavily respect the artists before me or learn from the greats (Albrecht Durer being my favorite), but I always found it somewhat crazy to try to compare my work to Leonardo's work to mine.
In the first few pages of Circling My Mother, Mary Gordon starts connecting everything to Bonnard's work. I took the liberty of looking up some of his pieces because I had never heard of him before. I suddenly understood both why I'm an art major and what Gordon was trying to communicate.
Mary Gordon describes a very important fact about his works. They are all very light, colorful, and playful, but they are most definitely not happy. His wife, Marthe, was suffering. He held this incredible sadness in such light, flighty colors. She uses this to describe her mother and much of the on-goings of her mothers life and surroundings. She particularly compares her mother to Marthe when she describes how she somewhat drowned in isolation.
Mary's mother stays in this nursing home with fluorescent lights and old people smell. She sits by herself all day sometimes, with her head in her hands. Mary states that she's unsure if her mother even thinks at all when shes like that. Her mother likes sweets and flowers.
The sweets, flowers, and her surroundings ultimately bring me back to Bonnard's paintings of hazy color. Mary's mother is enjoying them though no one knows why or how. He surroundings are bright but her situation is grave, and life keeps moving around her. Like the colors of Bonnard's paintings, Mary's mother is lost in an out of mind experience without feeling and mary herself relates to the colors by sheer uncertainty.
