Red

Dragon and Phoenix are Symbols in Traditional Chinese Weddings

Although blue is the favorite color of most people, red is a favorite, too. Depending on what survey you read, red ranks among the top four colors in popularity--second in the United States to blue, but fifth if we're talking about automobile colors. In any event, red is certainly popular. As a color, red is associated with emotional intensity, danger, courage, warfare, sex, anger, and heat. In many Asian cultures red is the color symbolizing happiness and good fortune. And of course red is the international color of communism.

Red may be the oldest color used by humans, in the form of ochres (iron-containing clays). Archaeologists have discovered many traces of red ochre in cave paintings and paleolithic burials. Other natural minerals--cinnabar or vermilion (both containing mercury) and red lead--and compounds from insects were in wide use in antiquity. Red was an exceptionally important color in ancient Rome, denoting Mars, god of war. So much so that Romans covered their victorious generals in red pigment. New cadmium pigments made 19th and 20th century colors brighter and more saturated. And now we have many newer synthetic reds based in organic chemistry--naphthols and quinacridones for example--that provide brilliance, high chroma, and permanence.

In the standard color wheel, red is opposite green, its complement. With blue and yellow, red is one of the primary colors in a standard wheel. Mixing red plus yellow makes orange; red plus blue makes violet. complements tend to cancel and make a neutral hue, but when placed next to one another in a landscape they give a pleasing vibration to the image. This means, for a landscapist, giving a support an undertoning of red for the greens of trees and grasses to dance against.

Claude Monet understood toning his canvas and sometimes used a thin and pale violet wash, presumably because it is the complement of yellow light. And of course he was a master in using colors. In "Route de Giverny en Hiver." 1885 (right), despite the overall coolness of the snowy landscape, the clouds, snow, and trees all have a warmer undertone likely from underpainting. Moreover, he also made red and red-violet accents sharpen the branches, especially on the far right and offsetting the cooler blues of the branches in the left background. It is a masterful example of his thought.

But red does even more in modern and contemporary works, where it becomes the principal color. A famous example of such a use of color in contemporary painting is "The Red Studio," 1911, by Henri Matisse. In this work he makes red the dominant color yet confines it to background, making instead his abstracted studio and artworks take the perceptual foreground. Matisse has also composed the simage so that our eyes enter and follow a preset clockwise pattern. This painting from more than a century ago destroys three dimensional conventions yet remains clearly and obviously representational. A neat feat.

In the middle of the 20th century Mark Rothko came into prominence for his stripped-down rectangles of color, termed "color field painting." In those works he balanced two different rectangles of color against a third color, sometimes pushing one or the other into the background, often employing very hot combinations of red-orange or crimsons against competing dull yellow ochres. In Red, Orange, Orange on Red (1962) he showed his understanding of color. Many have felt an emotional charge from viewing these canvases, and Mark Rothko remains an emblem of 20th century abstract art.

For those of us with a less dramatic flair, red is a perfect hot spot for the center of interest. In my watercolor sketch of the Discovery Garden, ISF 2019, I downplayed the chroma and intensity of most of the flowers because it seemed to me more important to give an overall impression. In the closer foreground beds the colors become higher in chroma until the bright reds of the closest hibiscus stop the viewer's gaze from going out of the frame.
The red serves as an important contrast to the dark greens of the background foliage and statue. Using a contrasting and high chroma color in a field of its complement provides interest and "pop" to a work, as many of our predecessors knew very well.

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