‘Awakening to Red’
Acrylic & Soft Pastel on Canvas. 2018
100 x 100 cm
Exhibited as part of ‘The Maggies Art Extravaganza’ at the Chester Hotel in Aberdeen, November 2018.
I created this piece after watching a documentary on colour blindness. In the film, a man described the experience of putting on specially designed glasses which allowed him to witness the full colour spectrum for the first time in his life. He speaks of walking out into the sunshine on his balcony and seeing a bright red piece of cloth hanging against the white render of the terrace edge. The vivid colour paralyses him with awe and emotion and he is nearly brought to tears. I became fascinated with this moment as a unique sensory occasion. The simple appearance of this taken for granted primary colour was to this individual an almost spiritual experience.
How could I convey this as a 2D piece of visual art? Simply painting a canvas a strong Cadmium red wouldn’t suffice. I played with the edge – painting the block with a pure white border. I then allowed two white bars to drip naturally across the red surface, but this didn’t begin to capture the essence of what I was seeking to express. I then realised that other colours would have to be employed alongside red to speak of redness as a concept. The idea came to me to create a steady plane of fractured colour which over spilled the white edge- speaking of the destruction of his sensory normality. I then had the idea to actually amplify the red, and the rest of the marks through reduction. I was at the time using large circles in a number of my paintings so opted for this strong form. A circle also spoke of the eye and vision in general. The surface was sanded down by hand over the space of a week or so to produce the desired effect. I enjoyed the act of deduction as a sort of conversation on the death of abstract expressionism and colour field painting at the same time. The piece was then cleaned, and framed in a smooth white box frame which again added a further layer of contrast.
This piece through the random mark making led on to many other fractured compositions; a motif which has become a huge part of my painting practice since.
This idea also led me to other conceptual questions regarding amplification of simple ideas – one of which I am still struggling with is. How could I express white using only black? How could i express black using only white?
The piece is still for sale amongst many others which can be seen in the Painting section of my work page.