Red Red

If you were to see a number of my paintings and if you were in the habit of tallying such things, you might conclude that red is my least favorite color, and you would be right.

I'm not talking here about the whole range of reds. I'm only referring to red red, crimson, cadmium red, that part of the spectrum of reds represented by blood and by most ripe tomatoes and by cardinal flowers and stoplights. That red.

A person might argue, "Well, you ought to love that kind of red, because blood is the most important fluid in your body." My answer would be that I'm indeed glad that blood is that color, because when you see it you know immediately that something is not right. But I am also glad that usually you only see suggestions of blood just under the skin, and that's where it should stay, out of sight and, most of the time, out of mind.

I prefer warm colors over cold ones, and red is considered to be one of the warm colors, but to my psyche red is something else entirely. Instead of having the comforting and soothing properties of warmth, red is the color of danger, anger, injury, recklessness, and just a general lack of class.

I think Mother Nature agrees, because red rarely comes to her hand for decorating the Earth, compared to greens, blues, yellows, oranges, and all the other big colors.

A painter has to be careful in his use of red reds, partly because they tend to be among the most expensive of pigments but much more because of their ability to draw the eye first and more thoroughly than any of the other hues. That makes it a greedy color.

It can be no accident that drivers of red cars are always suspect. All studies of their habits have probably been suppressed by those cusses, but to my observation they are the fastest and the most reckless on the road. Yet we can't assume that it was out of appreciation of this that Henry Ford told buyers of his Model T's that they could have any color they wanted, as long as it was black.

I don't know how red came to represent modern Republicans on the maps. Apparently they don't object to it, and I'm glad, yet I'm also amazed, because politically don't they remember at all how, not so long ago, red was always powerfully associated with the late and unlamented U.S.S.R. and Communists?

Nowadays, judging from an email embedment that I got recently, those who favor the fighting and the killing in Iraq have adopted red as their color, and they urged the display of red ribbons and such on certain days to show their support.

So what happened to yellow ribbons? But I hope that this is a sign that yellow will henceforth be eased out of military considerations.

Yellow is one of my favorite colors. I don't associate it with war, cowardice, or disease. I associate it instead with that Great Life-Giving Almighty above and around us each and every day for billions of years, the Sun.