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As If


As If
22" x 15", watercolour, 2001, private collection


This painting was part of a series I was developing called Red Shifts, exploring various strong emotional states (anger, passion, etc.) associated with the colour red, and seeing what that colour does to some relatively milder emotional states (comfort, hope, etc.).  I only ended up doing a handful of paintings even though I was getting into it and enjoying the monochromatic limits of this series.

This one deals with skepticism, a slight topic, but I think rendering it in such strong, evocative colours,  puts that skepticism in a much more powerful light than simply being about doubt. As viewers, it's our own emotional associations with red that provides a deeper subtext.

Obviously, I didn't just pull out my Alizarin Crimson and go to town with these (that would be boring); I made the rich blacks like I normally do by mixing various blues and browns, and colours other than red appear in the red areas. But, yeah, there's a lot of pure red, too.


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