“The most important thing for me,” he once said, “is my interior life.” I’d always thought this strange, as he became a painter at a young age. At Pratt, he was given one of the first samples of acrylic emulsion paint in the U.S, called Liquitex. H, my Corsican brother, was hooked. All these many years he’s used acrylic paint that, in his hands, appear like richly textured oils. An abstract painter relatively unknown after seventy-five years of work, he continues to paint, though climbing the studio stairs is hard these days. The last time we gathered, he talked about burning all his canvases before he dies. H calls us the Corsican brothers even though I’m a woman, and too young, and he’s not my brother. The Corsican Brothers, Alexandre Dumas’ novella, is about two brothers born cojoined, and surgically separated at birth. They remain emotionally sympatico for the rest of their lives. I’d like to be joined to H’s brain, his interior life. His mind is a fount of creativity, information, and experience. His mind coruscates and being around him, so do I.
He loves cadmium red and applies it with whatever is laying around his studio: sticks, rags, fingers, packing material, tape, spray paint, spatula, fly swatter, pie roller, a plastic spoon. His work is a dialogue between the aspirations of the pigment and the painter. “I have a lifetime of images in my head, trying to escape onto the canvas. Images are always wanting to pollute the painting by distracting from the real story, which is what the paint is doing viewed up close.” When we both lament how beauty is disappearing in art, he says, “It’s the single most enjoyable if frustrating ingredient. It gives the painting its chops! Like nature, beauty is so charming but potentially ruinous, always waiting to screw it up by crossing the line between beautiful and pretty.”
Red, for all its devotion from artists and the cosmetics industry, is disgusting. Crimson red comes from the cochineal, a scale insect. To get the deep rich color, the insect must be female and pregnant. She’s thrown live en masse into huge vats, churned furiously, leaving behind her much prized, crimson-red blood. It takes 70,000 cochineal insects to make one pound of dried crimson. Cinnabar, ore of mercury, is the source of vermilion red. In Roman times, most cinnabar came from mines at Almadén, in Spain. But mercury is highly toxic, and working in the mines was often a death sentence for the miners who were mostly prisoners and slaves. Today vermillion has been replaced by safer (and cheaper) cadmium red.
Napolean was apparently color blind. When fields were littered with the dead, instead of seeing the red of blood, he saw floods of green, verdant and shining. In his Battle of Austerlitz, the French army had 9,000 casualties and the Russian and Austrian allied forces suffered 15,000 casualties. That’s a lot of green.
Pink is red and white mixed. Blood and flesh. In the painting Conversion of St. Paul, Caravaggio conveys the body and spirit through intense chiaroscuro, light and shadow, with sharp splashes of deep red contrasted with the luminous flesh of St. Paul. Philip Guston painted Klu Klux Klan figures, his artist studio, and himself in bubblegum pink and blood red, in scalding, scathing, fleshy cartoons. The colors are in-your-face with thick impasto brushstrokes. Good thing H isn’t color blind. In fact, his paintings are flotillas of color, like Time, one of my favorites, 50 inches by 50 inches. The rosy creamy pinks look pastel, his reds are softened by white, a pink that no soldiers’ white flesh could possibly achieve covered in blood.
In W.G. Sebald’s colorfully written book, Austerlitz, he describes a night when he and a friend sat on an outcropping of rock just after darkness fell, and placed a lamp in a shallow hollow. The world became alight with thousands of moths, like a silent storm, with wings whirring in arcs, spirals, and loops. “…some had a plain basic hue, but when they moved their wings showed a fantastic lining underneath with oblique and wavy lines, shadows, crescent markings and lighter patches, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining and colors you could never have imagined; moss green shot with blue, fox brown, saffron, lime yellow, satiny white, and a metallic gleam as of powdered brass or gold.” Nabokov, an accomplished lepidopterist and synesthete, who sensed the color of numbers, wrote with color-saturated images. He loved the Red Admiral butterfly, with its resplendent scarlet wing bars, smoldering in a dark-spotted setting.
Red demands attention, which H does too, inadvertently. His genius often leaves me spellbound. When we talk, I need time away to absorb what has been said. In heraldry, red denotes courage and zeal, which at ninety, H still carries an abundance of. In Christianity, red is the symbol for blood, charity and sacrifice, a perfect symbol for women. In Hinduism, red destroys evil, a belief perhaps lost on Napolean.
Psychological studies show that red can cause restlessness, nervous energy, high blood pressure, heightened libido and even increased confidence. You could be called a red herring and still get the red carpet treatment. You might be in the red while painting the town red. Red is extroverted, strong-willed and determined. And yet there are two sides to this personality: focused and persistent; irascible and stubborn. Like H and I, Corsican brothers and lovers of color, 125 years of painting between us.
