Red alert!

For this month’s column, Suffolk-based Artist, Educator and Presenter Grace Adam explains why the colour red will never go out of fashion, in art

Oscar parties, good fortune, war and football shirts. Heat and anger, revolution, birth and passion, and of course Jolene’s ‘flaming locks of auburn hair’. Red has it covered. Inventive Romans produced one of the first synthetic pigments by roasting white lead to create glowing but toxic Red Lead or Minium. Bright and fairly cheap, it was used widely in Medieval manuscripts and paintings. In manuscripts, it is those decorative embellished letters; this work was called miniare, and the person applying it was a miniator. The tiny illustrations and exquisite drawings found in manuscripts became known as miniatures. Now we just use the word for any small work of art.

The justifiably famous Book of Kells, possibly created on the remote island of Iona bursts with complex and beautiful illustrations. Here, a pensive St John is flanked on the right by a small figure also clad in red, taking a crafty swig of red wine.

Here I must make a pitch for the Wenhaston Doom. If you haven’t visited it, you need to. A wonderful and bizarre object, it must have been terrifying to illiterate 16th Century church goers.

Protestant King Edward VI demanded that rood screens, statues, church paintings, stained glass all had to go. The doom was whitewashed. There it hid – disguised until in 1892, when the church was restored, and the boards were chucked outside to be disposed of. Overnight it rained and the painting revealed itself once more. In this panel, red demons wield red hot chains to corral the misbehavers into the jaws of hell. Be prepared, it’s not a gentle painting!

Should you wish to change up your hair colour for a new year, you could go for Titian Red. We have the great Venetian painter, Tiziano Vecellio to thank for that name. In fact, Titian with his array of sumptuous reds launched a fashion amongst wealthy Venetian women for red hair and red dresses. Van Dyck, Rubens, and Vermeer all used red, or rather reds to command the viewer’s eye and tell a story.

She turns towards us, most of her face under the shadow of that strange hat.

The artist is generous with his vermillion and glazes it with madder lake for the young woman’s huge and fabulous head piece. Fur or feathers, I’m not sure, but it glistens with decadence in contrast to the quieter tapestry behind her.

With his early pigment pieces Anish Kapoor (who often works in Venice), manipulates our perception of space and form. Shapes made of dense strongly coloured powder confuse our senses. Here brilliant, saturated red pigment appears to fall off a structure onto the floor.

Of red, Kapoor says: “It’s the colour of the interior of our bodies. Red is the centre.”

Prestige, belief or revolution, its symbolic power and deep human associations mean that red will never go out of fashion.

Visit Grace Adam Artist and The Art Channel.

Featured images – supplied