Marc Chagall’s fable-like, vivid paintings remind me of my filial world, when I had been happily naïve. Then life happened to me, like to everyone else, and I had to change. But I think, and I hope, that a little piece of me still believes that the world can be a fairy tale.
I speculated on the Bridges over the Seine for a long time. What does it mean? What the heck does the green goat symbolize? Maybe Chagall missed his childhood farm back in Russia? Does the red lady sit on a pink bird? Is she an angel? What about the bridges? Then, tired of the unanswered questions, I thought, who cares? One does not necessarily have to understand a painting’s meaning or the artist’s motives to enjoy it. Nobody will ever know exactly what the artist felt, so you have to feel your own feelings. Find harmony in the lines and colors. Put your own thoughts into it. Create your own meaning of the painting. Whatever, just something from your own conk. Chagall himself did not care people find out his symbols “which can be interpreted according to taste”, he said.
So I stopped thinking of the meaning and started soaking in the colors. I still do not know why the title is about the bridges. What I know is that sometime, when the sun goes down and somebody turns the city lights off, millions of couples will huddle up against each other and make love. That is how it is every night. And sometimes life presents them with a child. The world is a fairy tale after all.
