Painting is slow, meditative and a way to bring change | Opinion – NJ.com

By Shirley Salemy Meyer

I’m an avid painter. Fine art, such as peonies rendered in watercolors or portraits captured by oil, is not my forte. I favor the practical arts. Each year, in late spring and early summer, I paint something — a room, a radiator, a patio chair, a window seat — in my century-old house. In a week or a weekend, I see a dramatic change.

The notion of change is often thought of as difficult — changing jobs can be laborious, changing routines can be disconcerting, even frightening. But change can also be transformative. I approached this year’s painting season, a time when COVID-19 forced me to change my routines and added layers of worry about my elderly parents in quarantine and my teenage children in remote learning, with a profound need for something new. The slowness of rolling a fresh paint color along nine-foot-high walls, of brushing another layer of semigloss onto wide, decorative wood moldings, allowed contemplation during this disquieting time, a stocktaking of present-day problems and future possibilities.

During my weeks of isolation in Essex County — in the midst of the dangerous pandemic, sobering protests urging us to acknowledge and fight racial injustice, and stubborn national leadership — one project led to the next. I painted the attic, the mudroom and two bathrooms.

Painting is a methodical, meditative process. I use a roller to cover broad areas of the walls, and then carefully drag my brush along the narrow spaces that the roller is unable to reach. I don’t use tape to protect the window and door casings, the crown and baseboard moldings, when I cut in. Instead, I rely on my steady hand and a sharply angled brush. My body leans into the wall, nearly hugging it, as I pull the brush along the edge of the molding to get a clean line. The result of this slow, intimate work is a new look.

Sometimes, change can cause harm. The baseboard moldings are a mess, scuffed up by kids’ shoes and toys, and contain sections that are wavy and chipped. But lead paint is present amid the layers of paint. I’ll never risk sanding the molding to attain a smooth finish when lead paint dust can be so damaging to our health. I can live with the moldings’ flaws.

But most change is a mark of progress. My drop cloths are a historical record of change in the house: old sheets with dump trucks or bright green polka dots, discolored shower curtains and plastic tablecloths splattered with glitter glue. After each painting project, I wash them all, then store them in a basement room where I keep supplies. The room is filled with old gallons of paint and quarts of colors I tested in various rooms. I recently cleaned out the cans that I will never need again: an electric blue and lime green that were on the walls of the girls’ room a decade ago; a soft blue that adorned the “baby room”— the bedroom with the crib and changing table that two of my kids cycled into as infants and out of as toddlers. My youngest remained there — a twin bed replaced the crib and the changing table became a bookcase — and now three of its walls are painted white, the fourth a brick red.

The dining room has been three different colors in 19 years: golden yellow, off-white, and now a saturated, smoky blue. The color of the living room has changed from gold to beige to taupe during that same time period. The most dramatic makeover during my current painting season was in the mudroom, with the walls changing from fiery orange to a serene blue-green hue.

Each time I’ve painted a room, I’ve gained a new understanding, a new way of looking at the house and my environment. I never realized the usefulness of a bedroom window seat with storage until I painted it. I didn’t appreciate the intricacy of the balusters in the attic until I painstakingly brushed them with paint. That gorgeous new color in the mudroom, which toggles between blue and green depending on the time of day, opened my eyes to how much sunshine enters the room.

Right now, we all would benefit from such a new perspective — a shake-up in our thinking, a revitalization in our own lives and a much-needed boost to the collective well-being of the country. If only it came as easily as a few fresh coats of paint on imperfect walls.

Shirley Salemy Meyer, a Maplewood resident, is a part-time lecturer in the Writing Program at Rutgers-New Brunswick.

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