A New Painting: "Reds"

Reds, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 7 x 5 inches.

One thing that interested me in making this painting was the color red in many variations: lighter and darker, warmer and cooler. While I was working on it I worried that I wouldn't be able to balance the different hues, especially the warm orange-red of the left part of the painting with the cooler reds to the right. It took lots of adjusting and repainting of color until I felt satisfied that the whole was fairly harmonious. The red is made more insistent by the small rectangle of green; the gray curve echoing the red one is another non-red element. I also enjoyed the planes: rectangular, triangular and curved; parallel to the picture plane or tilting forward and back. I like the sense of a piling up of shapes. And then there are the holes, from the oval containing a tiny hole at the top right to the large holes right and left. Many of my paintings contain holes cut through surfaces in this way; I could easily leave them out, but for me they create a rhythm in addition to that of the other shapes and colors as your eye bounces from one dark round to another. And they are a humorous invitation to look deep, beyond the surface of things.