I think about colour all the time. As I write this, I have a box with a wide assortment of coloured pencils opened beside me; I’m not doing anything with the pencils at the moment, I just really enjoy staring at the variety of colours, the shades, the subtle changes from one hue to another. Just looking at them all gives me immense joy. I gravitate towards some shades more than others, though I’ve noticed that this changes all the time. Lately, I’ve been drawing lots of portraits, and I’ve naturally been drawn towards all the skin tones. Aside from black and white, I’ve also found that red is a constant in portraits, which got me thinking about the nature of red itself.

Red is everywhere you look, it’s very prevalent in nature. We are red inside. Our reflections have shades of red. Close your eyes and turn towards the sun: red behind your eyes. Red has accompanied our history as humans: red hematite powder was found scattered around the remains at a grave site in a Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing, where there is evidence of habitation as early as 700 000 years ago. Black, white and red were the first colours prehistoric artists used in the Upper Paleolithic age: the cave of Altamira in Spain has a painting of a bison coloured with red ochre that dates to between 15,000 and 16,500 BC.

Red is the first colour we see. When a brain injury leaves a person temporarily colour blind, red is the first colour they see. Red defines how colours themselves are defined: different societies develop their names for colours at different times and from varying influences, but almost all societies follow the same order for labelling colours: black first, white second, red third, and then green, yellow and blue. In some languages, the word for “colour” and the word for “red” is the same. There is an assumption that perhaps this prioritisation of colours had to do with how readily we reacted to them: we are not indifferent to red.

Red features prominently in almost all cultures and contexts. Catholic religious dress, lipstick, the red carpet, the stop sign; the Chinese bride wearing red for good luck, Atwood’s Handmaids forced to wear red robes as a semaphore of her fertility; the cinnabar-red frescoes in Roman houses, the red-light districts in cities the world over. Red is a potent signifier, and embodies a complex set of emotions and expressions. It is love, it is violence, it is anger, it is life, it is luck, it is danger, it is a warning, it is a delight. It is curious to note that in all this contradictory signification associated with red, even temperature is a variable, as red is not always associated to warmth: in the thermal spectrum, red colours are significantly colder than blue colours. As an object gets hotter, its glow shifts from red to orange, yellow, white, and eventually blue or even purple.

I think about red often, especially when I’m painting. I only tend to use Old Holland’s Cadmium Red Light oil paint, which I have a love-hate relationship with. Its vibrancy and energy straight out of the tube and on the palette is mesmerising, it is so alive that it seems to move. However, add the tiniest speck to any other colour and it’ll dominate it completely. I own no items of red clothing (I should qualify this: no external clothes, I recently bought a pack of underwear, and some briefs were dark red, almost maroon – does that count as red?!), and the only red item I own in my house is a transparent, red plastic desk organiser that I bought myself at university decades ago. I think I associate red with excess actually – excess emotion, excess feeling, excess noise - and part of me want to avoid too much of anything. But I’m slowly managing to reconsider how I relate to red, especially staring in awe at all the reds in this pencil box beside me…

Red

On Colouring Pencils