Someone once said that I use too much red in my art. Not everyone likes this color. Studies show that it makes our pulse and breath speed up. It’s heated, bold, and in my paintings, confrontational. It’s one of my favorite colors to paint with.
The pigment has a troubled history. Hematite mixed with ochre created the red hues in Neanderthal cave paintings. But to push this dull, earthy hue into more vibrant realms, humans had to get creative. And toxic.
"Beyond the Skin 1", oil on wood, 2001
“Cinnabar” was popular in Egypt and Rome, where workers extracting mercury to produce it died by the thousands. This pigment was highly prized and expensive, so that its use was limited to the upper classes. It became a symbol of wealth and importance. The orange-red “minium,” equally poisonous, was produced by super-heating white lead. It was most popular with Mughal artists from India and Persia in the 17th and 18th centuries, which is why their works were called “miniatures.”Renaissance painters, especially Titian, used “vermilion,” a synthetic pigment brought to the West by Arab alchemists during the Middle Ages.
When Europeans colonized the Americas, red exploded across the world. Around 2000 B.C.E., Aztecs and Mayans had developed a way to grow and harvest cochineal bugs, which they dried and crushed to extract a scarlet hue. It took around 70,000 dried insects to make a pound of dye. When the Spaniards saw the brilliant red fabric, they had to have it for themselves. It became extremely popular across Europe, once again becoming a symbol of power and wealth. But it came from the brutal enslavement of MesoAmerican natives. They were forced to produce the dye for the Spanish crown, creating the third most valuable treasure taken from the New World, second only to gold and silver. The hue was transformed into the pigment “carmine” that transformed artists’ palettes in the 15th and 16th centuries.
"Portrait of Agostino Pallavicini" by Anthony Van Dyck, 1621
None of these early reds were lightfast. Many of the paintings using them faded over time. It wasn’t until 1920 that the commercial paint “cadmium red” became available, thanks to the 1817 discovery of the new element. Finally, artists had a more permanent hue for their art. “Napthol” proved to be stable as well, but “lithol” flopped, most notably in Mark Rothko’s faded color field paintings.
The magic of red is especially suited to oil paint. Because light passes through the translucent medium to the white canvas below, it looks like the color glows from within. I love to lay down a thick layer of opaque cadmium red, then glaze over the top with alizarin crimson. I use transparent oxide red as a “cure-all” for glazing, and I mix it with ultramarine blue to create rich blacks.
What do you think about red? What does it make you feel?
Art Heals
I've always been deeply affected by Frida Kahlo's work. I love her fierce, truthful imagery. To me, that's healing. At a time when I was painting alone in my studio, creating art that almost no one saw, knowing that someone else used her art to survive painful experiences gave me hope. She wasn't afraid to lay it all out on the canvas. Sometimes she opened up her body to share her insides with the viewer.
Frida used a lot of red, too. Now that I know about the relationship between red and the history of colonialism and slavery in Latin America, this seems especially poignant.
