Red

I credited my use of red as a melodramatic effusion,“over done,” as if so many people had even seen my work enough to come to expect it, and then grow to resent it. Cadmium Red all over. Straight from the tube, I would add it to anything. Everything. It was comfortable and familiar, tracked and dated to assume that after a year spent on my CRASH series the hue left impressions on my artistic psyche. I stopped all at once using my limited palette, and demanded myself to use a full color range. Exposure therapy in a sense, to move away from an entire chroma. Deny it.

In doing so I began the same paintings over and over. Covering, washing, scraping away layers to add more on, relentless in my disengagement of red until the very end of a process. A dot here or there for signature’s sake and once I could bare it no longer. I hate these paintings. To look at them was to see something not of my mind, heart, nor hand. This led me away from color altogether, adopting graphite and charcoal as a monochrome pacifier for two years. When I tried again on painting studies or reworking an old painting I returned to my beloved red, and though happy with the works, I felt a guilt and disgust for my lack of color discretion and would abandon the medium altogether for months.

Again, I started a painting with burnt sienna, before sketching portraits, eyes gazing out at me. There was a lifelessness that no amount of additions would and tones could jolt to life. Nearly complete though dissatisfied I painted over it, covering with titanium white as the ghostly faces below still watched me through the gauze of my new slate. I watched that painting for days before abruptly leaving my ouch to cover it in my dearest red.

The next day I started again with a fresh sense of the image and a fervor to create it. In 6 hours I had the painting in front of me with a life and undeniable presence that made me apologetic I had tried to ever deprave myself of something as rich as life itself.

The post painting rush of excitement followed me to my shower to question why it felt so easy, and resolving that red is an utmost inspiration. Somehow it is not my favorite color, nor is it pervasive in my wardrobe, and I realized I do not even feel a spark or prefer it in spaces nor appreciate it in other works not my own. Red is the flint for the spark of my creativity, and only then. In no other circumstance do I feel so excited for red than when I am the one using it. I have decided this is not selfish, and in fact of no control of my own. Red is not mine nor am I belonging to it, but perhaps more closely we are colleagues. More aptly, maybe red is more my mentor.

I felt informed when my canvas started with red, knowing my shadows could relax in greens and blues, with the company of phthalo green being nearly as present as cadmium red in my work.

Even in my paintings I see myself most in the paintings where these colors have been allowed, perhaps they themselves decided, to be present.

I understand, to some capacity, why Mondrian had such fixation on the primaries, Picasso in his Blue and Rose Period, Van Gogh and his cadmium yellow, I could go on and on; but where I have heard these artists felt compelled to use these colors, I do not. I wish I could use anything but, yet I cannot make a work of art without cadmium red.

There is nothing without it but a sigh.