16: Seeing Red

Today was a hard day in the studio. I made a lot of mistakes. I had to start over and over and over again. I hated everything I did. Poor decisions. Many of them. Most, actually.

Then, I went in too intensely with the red at some point around the eyes, and something happened. Red eyes happened.

Of course. The first thing to heat up—tears, burning, inflammation—all of it.

This is a violent story, and red sounds the alarm. 

Red is the unrivaled color of violence, of blood, of the devil. It was (no surprise here) Karl Marx’s favorite color. 

The origin of the phrase “seeing red” likely has roots in bullfighting. Icarus was fighting many things—testing his limits, his father, his own stamina—though his own bull was, undoubtedly, the sun. 

In his book on the primary colors, Alexander Theroux unearths, among many other things, the pure violence of red—the forceful epicenter of the Hiroshima bomb, the furious insistence of the Santa Ana winds—though he also writes about less lethal things, like, say, Coca-Cola and Campari.

And, well, this.

“The living room of Dorothy Parker’s Bucks County, Pennsylvania, farm, bought in 1934 with Alan Campbell, her second husband, was painted in (count them) nine shades of red: pink, vermilion, scarlet, crimson, maroon, raspberry, rose, russet and magenta.”

Elsewhere in the book, Theroux mentions Ovid himself having a particular penchant for the red of blood, all of which somehow injects an urgency into the Icarus story for me—a sense of personal consequence, maybe.

Keith Haring once wrote that red has a power with the eye. Derek Jarman thought painters used red like spice. Matisse thought it had an effect on your blood pressure.

“I want a red to be sonorous,” Renoir once said, “to sound like a bell.

I wonder if red is the color of regret?

David Moolton frames this more—poetically.